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Contributions to Education 

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IFlo. 14 



HERBART AND FROEBEL 



AN ATTEMPT AT SYNTHESIS 



BY 



Percival Richard Cole, Ph. D. 



PUBLISHED BY 

TEACHERS COLLEGE 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
NEW YORK 

1907 



K)!3«ARY of congress/ 
I Wo CuDtes Received ' 

StP 28 190f 

^ Oopyn»hf Enby 
j CLAsfe A XXc, N6. 
I COPY B. 



•^l 



BRANDOW PRINTING CO,, 
ALBANY, N. Y. 



ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

_ Introduction 3 

ib Chapter I. The Philosophy of Froebel 7 

V I. A philosophy of nature 9 

I . Nature as spirit visible n 

f^ 2 . As objective 11 

j 3. The unity of nature 12 

4. Nature and man 14 

5 . Nature and development 14 

6. Nature as symbol 15 

II. A philosophy of man 18 

1. The primacy of mind 18 

2. Self-activity 20 

3 . The practical or moral life 21 

4. The reign of law 25 

5. Freedom 26 

III. A theory of the absolute 33 

1. God as the ground of all things 33 

2 . Pantheism 35 

3. Teleology 36 

Chapter II. The Philosophy of Herbart 41 

I. The philosophical relations of Herbart 43 

1. Herbart and Leibnitz 43 

2. Ethical views 44 

3. Herbart and Kant 45 

4. Spinoza and Leibnitz 48 

5. Fichte and Schelling 50 , 

II. The metaphysic of Herbart 52 

1. The methodology of Herbart 52 

2. The ontology of Herbart 55 

3. The cosmology of Herbart 61 

4. The epistemology of Herbart 62 

5. Certain implications for education 63 

III. The psychology of Herbart 65 

1. The so-called faculties 65 

2. Ideas as dynamic 66 

3. Reason and will 70 

4. Another interpretation 71 

Chapter III. The Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis 75 

I. An attempt at a psj^chological synthesis 75 

1. The soul and the concept 75 

2. Mental forms and mental content 77 



4 Analytical Table of Contents. 

PAGE. 

3. Habit and attention 79 

4. An evolutionary psychology 80 

5. Mental structure and function Si 

6. The self and the situation 84 

II. Possibility of a metaphysical and ethical synthesis 85 

1 . Freedom 85 

2. Progress and equilibrium 86 

3. Possibility and actuality 87 

4. Being and becoming 88 

5. Intellect and will 90 

6. The education of character 93 

Chapter IV. An Attempt at an Educational Synthesis 95 

I. Curriculum and method 95 

1 . Society and the curriculum 95 

2. Educational values 97 

3. Correlation and concentration 98 

4. Formal steps 99 

5. Epochs of culture loi 

6. Technique 102 

7. Instruction 103 

8. Education for vocation 105 

II. Nature and culture 107 

1 . Nature and civilisation 107 

2. Education by institutions 109 

3. Individuality m 

4. Interest 112 

Summary 114 



INTRODUCTION. 



The notion of a synthesis of Herbart and Froebel was first 
suggested to the writer by Professor John Adams, of London 
University, in 1905. Already the outHne of a synthesis has 
appeared in an article in the Educational Review, written by 
Professor Welton, and entitled A Synthesis of Herbart and 
Froebel.'^ Dr. F. H. Hayward, himself an able Herbartian 
writer, has admitted that this phrase suggests the vision of a 
third educational " Secret," beyond the secrets that seem to him 
to have been disclosed in the respective works of Froebel and of 
Herbart.^ The article by Professor Welton is suggestive, and 
only too slight. A more inclusive comparative study has been 
made by Professor MacVannel, of Columbia University.^ With 
the work of Professor Welton and of Professor MacVannel the 
present attempt at a synthesis is in general accord. Like both 
of these, it assumes the practical value of a philosophy of edu- 
cation. It is, however, widely differentiated, as to its aims, 
from the former by its scope, and from the latter by a less his- 
torical mode of approach. The writer is deeply indebted to 
Professor MacVannel, as well for his aid in the present under- 
taking as for his invaluable contributions to a philosophy of 
education. 

In the present dissertation, the term synthesis has been 
broadly interpreted. At the same time it has not been used to 
denote an aggregation of the educational principles of Froebel 
and of Herbart. Neither is it intended to imply that in cases 
where Herbart may be said to maintain a thesis, and Froebel an 
antithesis, anything like an equal validity need always be attrib- 
uted to the respective principles that may be emphasised by 
each. That which is sought is neither an aggregation of prin- 
ciples, nor an indifference to them, nor a forced equality of 
emphasis upon them, but a type of synthesis that may be called 
organic. The term organic may be opposed to mechanical, or to 

'September, igoo. 

^The Secret of Herbart. London, igo4. p. vii. 

^The Educational Theories of Herbart and Froebel. Teachers College, New York. 1905. 



6 Introduction. 

that piecemeal or mosaic type of eclecticism which is not uncom- 
mon in the literature of education. Perhaps an organic syn- 
thesis may be taken to imply at once an endeavour for approxi- 
mate consistency, and a repudiation of the attribute of finality. 
The value of the synthesis is likely to depend upon the breadth 
and depth of the interpretation of experience which it may con- 
vey. For the essential implication of a synthesis is a higher 
standpoint, a broader view, than those that are to be reconciled. 
Such a standpoint, such a view, should be possible in the light of 
a more recent philosophy. 

Probably there are those who may feel that in the following 
pages something is to a degree read into Herbart and Froebel ; 
and that the result is more akin to an outline of a philosophy of 
education than to the more limited reconciliation of two his- 
toric systems of educational thought. Such criticism is not 
unwillingly accepted. In a sense, to read a fuller meaning into 
Herbart and Froebel is the very purpose and final cause of the 
synthesis. The problem is philosophical, and to a degree even 
metaphysical ; but it is also eminently practical. For at present 
one of the chief practical difficulties in American education is 
the synthesis, or articulation, or reconciliation, of the primary 
school with the kindergarten. The primary school tends to be 
dominated by the ideas of Herbart, as the kindergarten is domi- 
nated by the ideas of Froebel ; so that there is apparently a need 
of a synthetic theory of education which may tend to the 
more amicable reconstruction of them both. 

Below are given the specific aims of the present attempt at a 
synthesis. 

1. To review the educational theories of Herbart and Froebel 
in the light of the philosophies which they imply. 

2. To compare and interpret those theories of Herbart and 
Froebel which concern reality, consciousness and character. 

3. To adjust in a measure the emphasis of Herbart upon cul- 
ture, instruction and mental content with the emphasis of Froebel 
upon nature, self-activity and will. 

One can only set Froebel upon the philosophical plane of 
Herbart by crediting him with what is implied as well as what 
is expressed in his educational theory. This done, he is often 
found to be in close sympathy with modern thought. Froebel, 
indeed, was a man of wide and deep reading. He twice rejected 



Introduction. 7 

the opportunity to become a university professor. He had read 
eagerly as a boy and a student; and his reading as a man 
included the Levana of Richter, the writings of Arndt and 
Novalis, the Bruno of Schelling, the works of Pestalozzi, and 
the Ideal of Humanity and the lournal of Human Life of 
Krause.^ " The Sonntagshlatt," writes Eleonore Heerwart, 
" leads us to a further conclusion concerning Froebel : he was a 
man of wide reading. Not only does every number bear as a 
motto at the beginning expressions of famous men, but also 
* voices ' and short biographical notices of such men as tended 
to ratify his views of education and of life."^ Such evidence of 
culture, it is true, bears no comparison to the profound scholar- 
ship of Herbart. Its value is to indicate, with a greater degree 
of certainty, the source and spirit of many of the ideas of Froebel 
which in themselves are less comprehensible. 

^Cf. Hanschmann. Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach, 1874. p. 27, p. 47, p. 41, p. 168, etc. 
^Wilhelmine, Frobels ersU Gattin. Eisenach, igos. p. 219. i-s, 



CHAPTER I. 

The Philosophy of Froebel. 

In his optimism, his will to believe, and his proclivity towards 
assumptions, Froebel had an entire school of contemporary 
thought to bear him company. For the appeal to faith as equal 
in authority to reason, the tendency to mysticism in expression, 
and symbolism in thought, and the supremacy of the synthetic 
over the analytic view, are to be regarded as marks not of Froe- 
bel only, but of romanticists generally, including the Schlegels, 
Tieck, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schelling. Science, art, 
religion and philosophy were all one to romanticism, for a com- 
mon feeling unified them and manifested them as aspects of a 
unitary and organic life. Thus Froebel would have none of the 
warning of an academic friend, that he should be guarded against 
philosophy which leads to doubt and darkness, but welcome art, 
the giver of life and joy.^ As to Schelling, so to Froebel, phil- 
osophy was an art, and art a philosophy, so that when either 
speaks as one who prophesieth, understanding nothing, he is apt 
to compensate for an occasional lack of lucidity by the certainty 
of his intuition.^ It is in vain to expect of either Froebel or 
Schelling a scholastic systematisation of his contributions to the 
life of the spirit. 

Froebel appears to draw his inspiration now from Schelling, 
now again from Fichte. In general, he follows Schelling when 
his discourse is of nature, or of symbolism, or when he takes 
an esthetic view of things ; but Fichte, whenever he thinks in 
terms of morality, personality, will, duty, or citizenship. Among 
the philosophers contemporary with Froebel, Krause had already 
effected a similar synthesis. To Krause Froebel wrote a long 
autobiographical letter; and in return Krause sent Froebel his 
books. Between these two there existed certain personal affini- 
ties. Both were Thuringians, both sons of clergymen, both 
inured to a certain measure of poverty and hardship, both lovers 
of nature from their youth, both wanderers according to the 
standard of their period and nation, and both contemporaries 

^Autobiography. Translated by Michaelis and Moore. Syracuse, N. Y. 1889. p. 40. 
^Cf. Schelling, Clara. Stuttgart, 1865. p. 175. 



10 Herhart and Froebel. 

save for Krause's advantage of a single year and for his com- 
paratively early death.^ Yet despite all these coincidences their 
lives as educators were by no means similar. For Froebel, 
although he had deep philosophical interests, a love of learning, 
and opportunities for advancement in the universities of Berlin 
and Sweden,^ lay under an inner compulsion of which the con- 
scientious Krause knew nothing, to be a Menschenbildner.^ Thus 
it was not Krause with his four daughters and eight sons, but 
the childless Froebel, who became the passionate lover and 
devoted teacher of children. 

Similarity of philosophical and religious convictions drew 
Froebel and Krause close together. In a review in Isis, which 
he wrote in 1823 upon Froebel's essay of the preceding year,* 
Krause attempted to call attention to the entire harmony of that 
essay with his own expressions of 181 1 in Das Urbild der 
Menschheit and Tagblatt des Menschheit Lebens. Indeed, quite 
in common with Krause,^ Froebel was convinced of the congru- 
ence of religion and science, the harmony of reason and art, the 
unity of mankind, the value of social service, theism as against 
pantheism, the dominance of the religious view in life, the 
might of love, the indivisibility of moral worth and beauty, and 
the freedom of the will as obeying only the law of its own idea. 
As with Krause, so with Froebel, God is permanent yet ever 
changing and working in all things as natura naturans, transcend- 
ent yet immanent, with even something of a special stress on the 
immanence. For them both, nature is through and through 
spiritual, and endowed with a tranquil constancy all her own. 
For them both, man for his part is essentially social, the sexes 
are spiritually and intellectually co-ordinate and equal, and the 
family is the chief institute of education, although by no means 
to the extent of the exclusion of education from the national con- 
cern. For the rest, Froebel had a more unitary conception of 
mind and body than Krause, who treated man as a triune bodily, 
mental, and spiritual being. Krause for his part had a univer- 
sality conceivably beyond even Froebel's, since he desired the name 
of the school of Froebel at Keilhau to be changed from Allge- 



'Krause, b. 1781, d. 1832. Froebel, b. 1782, d. 1852. 
'The University of Stockholm. 

^Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach, 1874. p. loi. 
*Ueber deutsche Erziehung, uberhaupt. 

'Cf. Ueher Krause und Froebel. Paiol Hohlfeld. Dresden, 1873. passim. Also 
Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. p. 148 sqq. 



Philosophy of Froebel. ii 

meine deutsche Ersiehungsanstalt to the broader title, Reinmen- 
schliche Ersiehungsanstalt fiir Deutsche. But this appeal of 
Krause to the catholicity of the ideals of the school of Rousseau 
perhaps lacks the happiness of the self-identification of Froebel 
with the surging forces of nationality. 

As a direct discipline of Krause and Schelling,^ Froebel devel- 
oped a world-view on the basis of a daring idealism. His own 
temperament inclined to the artistic, and was not averse even to 
mystic tendencies. His philosophy, then, is no cautious critique ; 
but neither need it be viewed as a closed system. It is, perhaps, 
none the less a philosophy because here and there it may lie 
open to ridicule, and oftener to misinterpretation. To adequately 
analyse his view of education is indeed to trace the ramifications 
of a wealth of overlapping categories. The problems of develop- 
ment, nature, spirit, will, society, and duty need to be examined 
and related in thought. At any rate as they are coming to be 
used in current educational literature, the well-worn categories 
of unity, development and self-activity seem to furnish an inade- 
quate clue by which to unravel such a labyrinth of fundamental 
questions as confronts us here. Let us rather borrow from 
Froebel the scheme of the Menschen Erziehung, to the extent 
merely of discussing in succession his philosophy of nature, his 
philosophy of man, and his philosophy of the absolute. 



It seemed to Kant, the philosopher of Konigsberg, that since, 
according to his analysis, the outer world can only produce sensa- 
tions, or the raw material of knowledge, whereas the mind is much 
more than sensations, or their sum or product, it should follow 
that mind must be possessed of an a priori synthetic activity of its 
own. " If," he said, " intuition must conform to the nature of 
the objects, I do not see how we know anything a priori ; on the 
other hand if the object, as object of sense, conforms to the 
nature of our own capacity of intuition, I can very well con- 
ceive such a possibility."^ This declaration of a revolution in 
thought, which was likened by Kant himself to the supersession 
of the Ptolemaic by the Copernican hypothesis of the revolution 

'Especially through Middendorff, Langethal, and Krause, Froebel was also a disciple 
of Schleiermacher. Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach. 1874. p. 94. 
^Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Berlin, 1889. p. 19. 



12 Herbart and Froehcl. 

of the heavenly bodies, received independent confirmation from 
psychology and the religious consciousness. Fichte and Schel- 
ling built upon the Kantian principle a completer idealism, hav- 
ing in each case faults of its own, but transcending the dualism 
which, with a suspicion of the old Cartesian leaven, Kant had 
perpetuated in his system by the retention of an unknowable, 
mentally unconditioned, residuum of things-in-themselves. For 
his part Fichte, taking his departure from the Critique of Judg- 
ment rather than that of the Pure Reason, projected an idealism 
all too subjective, in which only the Ego exists. But for Fichte, 
since life is regarded as the reconquest, by the practical or moral 
Ego, of the field of self-limitation which the theoretical or know- 
ing Ego has set about itself, and which common sense calls the 
objective world, and since also the process of moral reconquest 
implies a universal moral order, the moral order was the one 
true self, the infinite will, the mediator between the self and the 
spiritual world, and the common source of both ; in a word, God.^ 

To Schelling, nature was more than the self-set limit of Fichte, 
more than subjective, and more than moral ; for surely it is need- 
less or fantastic to morally reconquer, with Fichte, say the spots 
on the surface of the sun. The world had for Schelling an 
esthetic unity. Nature was spirit visible, spirit nature invisible. 
Through Krause and other channels the Absolute of Schelling, 
although in its final form too negative, too like a mere indiffer- 
ence,^ and too vulnerable to the satire of Hegel,^ may have helped 
to reveal to Froebel the common ground and source of visible 
and invisible spirit in the unifying will of God.* This was a 
culmination of the romanticist tendency of thought, which, half 
poetic, more than half intuitive, and all inspired as it was, is in 
so many cases the key to the peculiarities of Froebelian education. 

The attitude of Froebel towards nature is definitely marked by 
the following positions: Nature is (a) spirit visible; (b) objec- 
tive; (c) a unity, such that every part is utterly in harmony with 
every part ; (d) one with the mind of man, in the sense of involv- 
ing a necessary correspondence with his spirit, based upon a com- 
mon foundation in the absolute spirit, or in God ; (e) an harmoni- 
ous system developing according to its own inner laws, and as it 

'C/. Fichte. Werke. Berlin, 1845. II. p. 20Q. 

'C/. Schelling, Werke. Stuttgart und Augsburg. 1839. IV. p. 103. 

'V. Phdnomenologie des Geistes. Preface. 

*Ci. Menschen Erziehung. hrsg. Seidel. p. 144. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 13 

were an organic whole; and finally (f) a type and symbol of the 
life of humanity. 

1. Nature as spirit visible. Schelling, in reaction from the 
determination of nature according to Fichte as an abstract limit, 
held nature to be parallel to man and even larger and more real. 
He believed that there was no phenomenon in consciousness 
whose embodiment in nature he could not see. Such a doctrine 
may be interpreted in either of two ways. It may imply no 
more than the objectivity of nature, which Fichte in a way had 
denied. It may mean, again, that consciousness is a mere pro- 
duct ; and no uhimate process. If this be so, man is to be inter- 
preted from nature, rather than nature from man. But this is 
not the point of view of Froebel, highly though he valued the 
reality of nature. For him it may be said that nature at every 
point adumbrated spiritual relationships. Indeed, if the ethical 
meaning of idealism be no more mysterious than this, that it lies 
in seeking the explanations of things in their ideas, of lower 
forms in their higher possibilities, then it was a true idealism that 
moved Froebel, when the crux came of interpreting the given 
symbolic relation between consciousness and nature, to call 
nature the symbol, mind the reality. Herein is the philosophical 
basis of Froebel's symbolism, in itself not necessarily unsound, 
however ridiculous in a few of its applications.^ On the prin- 
ciples of Froebel, the educator need not go beyond symbolism 
to mysticism, if he will but teach nature not in its mere exter- 
nality, but in its life, beauty, spirit and meaning. There is little 
danger of reading spirit into nature if nature be visible spirit. 
The danger is only of misreading — corruptio optimi fit pessima. 
For only gradually are we di fife rent iated from our environment, 
which therefore shares in our spiritual nature; and whether by 
the poetic process as with Wordsworth, or by school rambles as 
with Froebel,^ the growing mind is pledged by instinct, by kin- 
ship, and by utility, to cherish in relation to it a manner of 
sympathetic intercourse. 

2. Nature as objective. Although they tended to regard nature 
as spiritual, or organic to consciousness, neither Schelling, nor 
Hegel, nor Froebel desired to detract from her objectivity, her 
reality, or her permanence. Nature to Schelling was the " com- 

^E.g. Der B-all ist ein Bild des All. Kindergartenwesen (Seidel) p. 40. 
^Menschen Erziehung, hrsg. Seidel. p. 96. 



14 Herbart and Froebel. 

plete real side in the eternal process of subject becoming object ; " 
and the philosophy of nature was the " first and necessary side 
of philosophy itself."^ Froebel would have been willing to grant 
that nature is objectively given, but essentially as a means to 
conscious life, and subordinate to man, " a more beautiful ladder 
than Jacob's between earth and heaven."^ An educational appli- 
cation by Froebel of the doctrine of the objectivity of nature is 
his agreement with the insistency of Pestalozzi upon things before 
words. Children are dejected by the inanities of a premature 
technical nomenclature. A text-book^ has profaned the sancti- 
ties of the kindergarten with " tender violet voices " like this : 

" Do tell me," whispered a violet bud to a violet close by, 
" when will I be able to show my pretty blue dress ? It's non- 
sense my wearing my green pinafore so long ! " " If you were 
grown up enough to leave off your pinafore you would call your 
pinafore a calyx, and your blue dress a corolla. From your child- 
ish way of talking any one can see you are nothing but a baby." 
" I wonder if I've got those little stems inside me with gold tops 
like you have ? " went on the violet bud. The violet answered 
hastily, " Of course you have ; but don't call them stems — stamens 
is the right name for them. You're absurdly childish even for 
your age ! " 

One may leave such travesties with Froebel's patient comment 
that the words may wait,* only adding that he had every sympathy 
with the word in talk, and song, and story, if it were but the sym- 
bol of power. At the same time, contrary to a prevalent impres- 
sion, Froebel is distinctly for reality in education. Realising to 
a greater extent than Fichte, or than Herbart, that nature is 
real, and to a degree objective, Froebel took his material from 
the near at hand, developed occupations from contact with visible 
and tangible objects, and studied nature for what it is, as well 
as for what it may symbolise. 

3. The unity of nature. Nature, which to Schelling was an 
Odyssey of the spirit,^ the spirit striving to return to its own 
true inwardness through the form of outwardness in which it 
is clad in nature, seemed to Herbart not deducible from a single 
principle, but to be the phenomenal manifestation of a plurality 

'Schelling, Werke. iSjg. V. p. 324. 

^Menschen Erziehung. hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 136. 

^Tht Kindergarten Room. By F. A. Fistram. Blackie and Son. 1906. 

*Ibid. p. 135- 

^Cf. Hoffding. History of Modern Philosophy. 11. p. 165. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 15 

of independent reals. Yet if the unity be not conceived to be 
such as excludes difference, if it be as it seemed to Froebel, 
organic, then the unity of nature is an intelligible hypothesis. It 
is the point of departure from which Froebel endeavors to explain 
mind, nature, education, life and the absolute. His opening 
words in the Menschen Ersiehung read like the opening words of 
Krause in Das Urbild der Menschheit, and not unlike many 
expressions of Schelling. For instance : " Nature in its very 
essence," said Schelling,^ " is one ; there is one life in all things, 
and one power to be, the same regulative principle through ideas. 
There is no pure materiality in nature, but there is everywhere 
soul symbolically represented in body, with a preponderance of 
one or the other in phenomena. For the same reason there can 
be but one science in nature." Mr. Bradley and others repeat 
the same thing. " In reality there can be no mere physical 
nature. The world of physical science is not something inde- 
pendent, but is a mere element in one total experience. "- 

For Froebel as for so many of the metaphysicians of his day, 
the unity of the world was a consequence of its spirituality. In 
one sense man is a part of this unity, since his physical being is 
an atom in its immensity, and subject to all its laws ; in another 
he is a higher unity, capable of making the whole world his own, 
a bearer of its purposes for whom the stars fight in their courses. 
He is a member, yet also a whole; a part, yet all-inclusive; a 
Glied-ganses. The desire to comprehend nature under intelli- 
gible laws is by Froebel set down to the galvanisation of this 
nature as a Glied-ganses by the fundamental instinct common 
throughout the world, for each individual man, animal or plant 
to actualise his own potentialities. The genuine boy, says Froe- 
bel, when you show him the objects of nature, will soon ask about 
their higher unity and causation.^ There is a subtle distinction* 
between the master, who controls the elusive details of experi- 
ence by law, and the mere teacher who allows himself to be lost 
in a bewildering manifold of isolated incidents. Fragmentary 
study devitalises natural objects and militates against the vigor 
of the human mind.^ 



^Werke, 1859. V. p. 32s- 

^Appearance and Reality. London, 1903. p. 283. 

^Menschen Erziehung. p. 133. 

*Ibid. p. 81. 

^Menschen Erziehung. p. 133. 



i6 Hcrbart and Frocbel. 

4. Nature and tnan. The unity of matter and mind, man and 
nature was for Froebel not sameness but a Divine immanent will ; 
intuitive perhaps, shot out of a pistol maybe, but not the night 
in which all cows are black. It has even an empirical basis so far 
as evolution is empirical. The nature that is akin to man cannot 
be spiritless.^ To Froebel the kinship was close, so close that 
the Christian, he who reads in nature her deepest sermons, is the 
only true naturalist.^ The spirit of nature and the soul of man 
are one, with the common ground and source, God.^ No diflfer- 
entiation, it is true, appears to go deeper than between mind and 
matter, but none is more surely confined within the limits of a 
system. 

The unity of man and nature, so close to the heart of poetry 
and romanticism, so dear to Froebel and Wordsworth, might 
easily lend itself to the gospel of Rousseau, education according 
to nature. Froebel seems to be at times a little too enamored 
of spontaneities, a trifle over- jealous of civilisation. We are 
prone, he says, to cover the divine source of life in all our hearts 
with rubbish, to dam it up with waste, to hedge it in with thorns.* 
Not that the defect as it appears in Froebel is serious, or much 
more than an aspect of the emphasis that he sets on self-activity. 
When the idea of membership, of the Glied-ganzes, or of organ- 
ism, prevails in Froebel, nature-worship in the Rousseau sense is 
quite transcended. 

5. Nature and development. Granted that the mystical con- 
nections which Froebel postulated between the worlds of crystals, 
animals and vegetables will not stand the test of scientific inves- 
tigation, being at best a trespass of metaphysic upon fields that 
are not its own, the fact remains that Froebel's intuitions of 
evolution have endowed his educational theory with a certain 
permanence and validity which otherwise it could hardly have 
gotten, and in virtue of which it surpasses other systems, at least 
in the quality of anticipating views now current. It is true that 
since Darwin and Wallace we have a more definite idea of the 
nature of the inner laws of natural development ; and that 
Froebel's deductions are subject to empirical revision, and occa- 
sionally, as in crystallography and the psychology of language, 

'C/. Krause. Das Urbild der Menschheit. Dresden. 1811. p. 7. 
^Menschen Erziehung. p. 96. 
^Menschen Erziehung. p. 144. 
*Ibid. p. 163. 



Philosophy of Froebel. if 

may find their appropriate rest in the wastepaper basket. But 
among the truths that follow from the sanity of Froebel's main 
positions, that is to say, that nature develops by inner laws, and 
that these laws have a spiritual or teleological bearing, these 
which follow are of validity for education. Firstly, an accurate 
observation of natural laws in their evolution should lead up 
to a logical basis for the school curriculum ; and secondly, if 
matter be really to us concrete spirit, this logical basis should 
tend to be psychological also. In the gifts and occupations 
Froebel endeavored to perfect such a logico-psychological sys- 
tem. The task was well done. But, since the situation contains 
a progressive factor, it involves a legacy of work, and is essen- 
tially a social undertaking. Since the plays and occupations of 
Froebel, admirable as is their tout ensemble, have no right 
divine, since again their author pinned his faith to their felt neces- 
sity rather than authority,^ and since they may be a little out of 
touch with the environment of here and now, it seems to follow 
that kindergartners might logically, in the light of the knowledge 
and the needs of later generations, reinterpret the inner laws of 
nature and retouch the curriculum for themselves. 

6. Nature as symbol. If nature be spiritual, that is to say, 
akin to the highest level of being ; if it have no pure materiality,^ 
but be spirit somehow embodied ; if man may have communion 
with it, and may find in it the anchor of his purest thoughts ; then 
it may well be supposed to convey a spiritual suggestion to man. 
In other words, it may well have for man a meaning beyond 
that of its external appearance, or in short, a force of symbolism. 
Yet symbolism is a troublesome tool. Bridging as it does the 
realms of things and conceptions, should it fall wholly within the 
one, it becomes forced ; within the other, fanciful. One never 
knows where to halt. The lily may have its educational value 
as a symbol of purity, and yet the sphere may be a failure as the 
embodiment of moral unity. Either of them may have a symbolic 
value for an adult only, just as a doll has enormous symbolic 
value, but only to girls between definite ages. The same object 
may have different symbolic values for different people. The 
truth seems to be that symbolism is an organon more than usually 
subjective. A black cat symbolises witchcraft to a superstitious 

^Kindergartenwesen. hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 283. 

^Schelling, Werke. V. p. 325. And Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 283. 



l8 Herbart and Frocbcl. 

man ; but, one may believe, danger and death to a mouse. The 
mind creates symboHc connections between things and principles, 
just as it imposes its laws upon phenomena, but with greater 
freedom. Symbolism will therefore be valid in education in so 
far as the children under the direction of the teacher make it so. 
To fulfil this condition it should be natural, unaffected, appeal- 
ing to all or nearly all, and adapted to age and mental develop- 
ment. For a child, child symbolism ; for an adult, adult sym- 
bolism. There are many illustrations in Froebel's writings of 
the lengths to which symbolism may innocently go. In crystals 
he saw mirrored the whole life of man ; in mathematics the 
religion of the soul.^ Nor is there any doubt that to Froebel 
crystals ivere a mirror of life, as mathematics " a fixed starting 
point and a sure guide in the study of the inner connection of the 
manifold of nature,"^ just as to Tennyson the flower in the 
crannied wall was a symbol of what God and man is ; but to apply 
such symbolism directly to education is to make the ill-grounded 
assumption that children will discern universals in a compara- 
tively isolated particular as easily as a Tennyson or a Froebel, 
when in truth few grown men can be found to have done so. 

It would not appear to be the root idea of symbolic education 
that is in fault, namely, that man, the microcosm, finds a type 
of his spirit realised in the macrocosm, nature.^ The error, 
if error there be, lies rather in the haste and enthusiasm with 
which this general symbolism is applied to incommensurable 
details. To such a haste, to such an enthusiasm are due Froe- 
bel's a priori theories of crystalline forms, his bizarre knack of 
establishing connections between words on the basis of mere 
sound,* and his assertion that in language vowels represent the 
inner, unity ; consonants the outer, individuality. For Froebel 
and extreme romanticists such connections did exist ; yet they 
must be reckoned, because they obscure more legitimate laws and 
unities, not only defective but false. 

Symbolic education is the principle of the Froebelian gifts and 
occupations, the common source of their strength and weakness. 
Unfortunately the psychology of the gifts is not always and on 
every side defensible. Holding as he did that the child mind is 

^Menschen Erziehung. p. 140. 

^Ihid. p. 137.. 

^Cf. Education by Development, p. 174. 

*E. g. Meister and meist. Menschen Erztehung. p. 81. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 19 

from the outset a unity, trailing universals like clouds of glory 
from heaven, it is not wonderful that Froebel should have devel- 
oped an overconfidence in the capacity of children to appreciate 
the symbolisation of principles in a single concrete object. Even 
Herbart, who in the main regarded symbols as an obvious bur- 
den on instruction,^ was not far from this pitfall when he advo- 
cated " marking out with bright nails on a board the typical 
triangles, and placing them continually within sight of the child 
in its cradle.^ The sphere, thought Froebel, would make mani- 
fest unity, and the holding of differences in unity ; the cube, while 
not concealing unity, would emphasise variety ; motions with the 
ball would arouse contrast and self-distinction,^ and so forth. 
It is little to the purpose to offer this defence, that these philo- 
sophical meanings are for the teacher, not for the child ; and that 
it is the fact, and not the name, of unity, difference, etc., that is 
apprehended. For, in the first place, the symbols are educa- 
tively worthless unless their meaning is for the child ; and in the 
second place there is no reason to believe that the mere facts of 
imity, difference, and other forms of life may be better conveyed 
to children from a cube and a ball than a tree and a stone. It 
may even be pointed out that a sphere will make manifest not all 
unity but little more than the unity of a sphere, the cube empha- 
sise not all difference but little more than its own differentiations, 
and motions with the ball awaken contrast and self-distinction 
practically only in relation to the ball. Not that the generali- 
sations, unity, differentiation, self-distinction, are valueless ; but 
they are in the gifts inadequately grounded ; just as it is one thing 
to hold with Tennyson that to know fully the flower in the cran- 
nied wall is to know what God and man is, and quite another to 
look for the data of such knowledge in the flower alone, apart 
from the infinity of its relationships. 

With all this, the weakness of the symbolism of Froebel appears 
to be less than its strength. Symbolism is a law of human devel- 
opment, whereby the child sees in his broomstick a horse, in his 
bricks a palace, in all his games and plays a real life and a serious 
society. Plays with dolls are the natural anticipation of house- 
hold life and maternity; with toy ships or soldiers, for the spirit 

^AUgemeine Pddagogik. Pad. Schrift. I. p. 176. 

^Ibid. p. i8,v 

^Friedrich Froebels Kindergartenwesen (Seidel). pp. 40-64. 



20 Herbart and Froehel. 

of the sea or war ; with other children, for social life. Where the 
gifts are unsatisfactory, it is less for their symbolism as such 
than its adult character. Thus the Mother Plays are successful 
because theirs is a symbolism in accordance with the child's own 
heart. Perhaps romantic better describes the child mind even 
than symbolic. Children are naive, trustful to credulity, and 
fancy free, with an imagination as it were not yet blighted by the 
light of common day. If therefore childhood be a stage of 
development to be lived out as such, then songs, games and 
stories are a needful staple of its education. Even the just 
reminder that what in children seems to us poetic may be com- 
monplace to them, that the boldness of their metaphors may be 
correlated with the limitation of their stock of ideas, and that 
the life of common day may be ultimately more reliable than the 
radiance of infancy, alters not the principle of full and free devel- 
opment at every stage, and among other stages that of a joyous 
and saltatory romanticism. Children bending their imagina- 
tion upon the glowing future are unconscious vehicles of social 
ends. The mother, the teacher, is to perceive this ; and seeing, 
she is to fill with a divine purpose^ the void of a boundless and 
formless fancy.^ But symbolism has now carried us over from 
the philosophy of nature to a philosophy of man. 

II. 

I. The primacy of mind in nature. Implied in the educational 
theory of Froebel there seems to be a philosophy which may be 
described as an objective teleological idealism. This need not 
perhaps imply that nature moves to a predestined goal, whither 
it cannot but arrive in the appointed way and at the appointed 
time, wholly apart from the co-operation of man. But it may be 
well to define this phrase, objective teleological idealism, as it 
is here understood. By idealism is here implied that the world 
is through and through rational ; by teleological, that it is to be 
interpreted in the light of ends or purposes, and that explanation 
proceeds in a sense from the higher or more spiritual types to 
the lower ; and by objective, it is intended to convey that the 
real world is not a mere subjective construction by individual 
minds, but such as exists for an absolute spirit ; and again, from 

^Cf. Education by Development (International Education Series), p. lyg. 
^Cf. The song of the knights in the Mother Play. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 21 

an ethical standpoint, that there is a best as well as a good. 
It is a principle that has fairly stood the test of time, and the 
inquisition of psychology, that consciousness, mind, some form 
of spirit, is the constitutive principle of the universe.^ Man 
lives, it is true, in a world of phenomena to which it is his duty 
to conform. He may not wallow naked in December snows by 
thinking on the summer's heat. He must turn experience to 
account rather than defy it. And yet, how we regard facts 
transforms them ; so that, for instance, a thunderstorm is differ- 
ent to him who welcomes it and to him who fears. " For in 
truth these independent facts, which we have only to acknowl- 
edge, are a mere figure of speech."^ These facts owe their 
meaning to our own interpretation. There are undiscovered 
stars, but they do not yet exist for us ; or would not but for the 
fact that we have reason to be convinced of their existence. To 
us they cannot be facts until the human spirit shall have called 
them forth into the reality of experience. The metaphysical 
position that regards experience as given, and reason as an indis- 
pensable factor in it, is corroborated by the evidence of a psy- 
chology that affirms that the sense data — a mere touch, an 
impact of air waves upon the drum of the ear, a tiny flat inverted 
image upon the retina — can be regarded as no more than the raw 
material of experience, or at best only its germ. But, it may be 
urged, as the germ explains the tree, so may the sense-datum 
explain experience. But how does the germ explain the tree? 
What would man know about a tree, having seen naught but 
seeds? It is not the germ that explains the tree, but the tree 
which explains the germ ; and it is experience which explains the 
data of sense, not the latter which explain experience. Like- 
wise it is not man's ancestry which explains man. The genetic 
psychologist who explains man's ancestry is not explaining the 
humanity of to-day so much as doing the important work of 
interpreting primitive man and childhood in the light of the 
highest achievements of the present. There is in the meantime 
a reaction of genetic studies upon present ideals, as of knowledge 
of the germ upon the conception of a tree ; but the understanding 
of the former in each case is primarily dependent upon that of 
the latter. Mind or spirit, it would appear then, is the constitu- 

»Cf. Chapter I. i. 

^Personal Idealism. (London, 1902.) p. 62. 



22 Hcrbarf and Froehel. 

tive principle of the universe, because only mind or spirit con- 
tains the principle of meaning. It is to be admitted that idealism 
presupposes the necessity of a value and meaning in Ufe; pre- 
supposes even the optimism of the doctrine that the best is the 
true. Not whatever is, is right; but whatever is right, is true. 
This is evidently a restatement of teleology, or the doctrine that 
explanation is from ends, or values, or final causes. Explanation 
is from the truest that is known. If then the best be the true, 
one must explain nature by what one recognises as best, to wit, 
her higher, more spiritual levels, and especially man in his ideal 
aspects. One must in short discern in what ought to be the 
condition of what is. 

2. Self -activity or dei'elopment from zvithin. All this is in 
the spirit of Froebel,^ and is the philosophical groundwork of his 
method. For observe the connection. That reality is spiritual 
means that it is always for some consciousness, immanent or 
transcendent. My reality is for my consciousness ; absolute 
reality for the absolute consciousness; Froebel would say, for 
God. " Pure truth is thine alone," as Lessing put it.'^ Clearly 
then, for the individual, only himself can be the constructor of 
his own world-view ; and education, as to method, can only be the 
actualisation of inner potencies,^ the expedition of a real spirit, 
and a mode of self-activity. It is self-activity, a manner of self- 
diiTerentiating unity, that sets human education on a plane of 
its own; for though, as Kant admitted, the sensuous conscious- 
ness of an animal is a kind of unity, it is not so for itself ; whereas 
a man's mind is conscious unity, and preserves its continuity 
throughout every modification.* That things are spiritual, 
explanation teleological, and the best the true, are positions 
which Froebel assumes, as when with a characteristic emphasis 
upon intuition, faith and feeling, he says : "All things have come 
from the divine Unity, from God, and have their origin in the 
divine Unity, in God alone. ... All things are only 
through the divine effluence that lives in them. The divine 
effluence that lives in each thing is the essence of each thing. "^ 
As this divine effluence becomes in man something autonomous, 
education, as its realisation, is self-development. In it the indi- 

'C/. Chapter III. Teleology. 

^Eine Duplik. Werke (Leipzig, 1897). XIII. 23, 24. 

'C/. e. g. Kindergartenbriefe (Wien und Leipzig. 1887). 132-3. 

*Cf. Caird. Critical Philosophy of Kant (Glasgow, i88g). I. 313. 

^Menschen Erziehung (SeideO. Einleitung. p. 3. Trans. Hailmann. pp. 1-2. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 23 

vidual fulfils purposes that are not only cosmic, but his own. 
For Froebel, individuality in development is real, not phenomenal 
only. " Rich is the life of the child growing to boyhood, but 
we see it not ; living is his life, but we do not feel it."^ And yet, 
it functions in a social, cosmic, divine whole. " In God's world, 
just because it is God's, something is steadily expressed, and it 
is an unbroken progressive development in all things."^ It will 
be necessary to return upon the conception of education as evo- 
lution at a later stage of the present analysis. In the mean- 
time, one of its chief implications is the importance of activity 
and morality. 

3. The practical or moral life. Idealism, in the broader ethical 
sense in which Kant, Herbart, and Schopenhauer may be said to 
be idealists, is at bottom a social philosophy. For the guidance 
of life by conscious moral principles, which is ethical idealism, 
is of necessity, since moral principles are of social outgrowth 
and bearing, social. It is perhaps a matter of opinion whether 
there be a necessary logical connection between ethical and meta- 
physical idealism. Although not all metaphysical idealists have 
been ethically inclined ; although Schelling for one thought rather 
in terms of art than morality ; and although certain realists, like 
Herbart, have had strongly ethical sympathies ; it may be urged 
that since only spirit or reason conveys meaning, ethical ideal- 
ism, which interprets in terms of highest meanings, can only con- 
sist with a metaphysical idealism, a view of the world as in some 
sort spiritual or rational in its ultimate constitution. 

Be this as it may, Schopenhauer, while something of a protes- 
tant against the metaphysical idealism of Fichte, is in the 
Fichtean and Froebelian spirit when he asserts the priority of 
the will. " Will is first and original ; knowledge is merely added 
to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. 
Therefore every man is what he is through his will ; and his 
character is original, for willing is the basis of his nature."^ 

For Fichte also human life was a continuous exercise of will. 
It was the clash of an infinite spiritual order with a finite sen- 
suous order* like Tennyson's sense at war with soul, or rather, 
soul at war with sense. It was primarily effort, not thought 

^Menschen Erziehung. p. 44. 

^Mutter und Kose-Lieder (Seidel). p. 158. Trans. F. and E. Lord. p. iS4. 

^The World as Will and Idea (London 1883). p. 377. 

^Fichte, Werke. II. p. 288. Also Adamson's Fichte. p. 196. 



24 Herbart and Froebel. 

nor interest. Fichte blamed Rousseau for taking only inta 
account the sorrows of the human race, and not its powers of 
self-help. His own constant exhortation was: "Act! Act! for 
that reason are we here."^ For Krause also the practical or 
moral side of life was of supreme importance. Krause based 
social endeavor upon gratitude; for since the individual receives 
according to his capacity and opportunity of the treasures of 
social life, so should he thankfully lay his own offering upon the 
altar of mankind.^ The significance of an active aspect in life, 
an aspect of moral endeavour rather than acceptance of what is 
regarded as inevitable, had been emphasised by the pathfinder, 
Lessing. Lessing would prefer the ever-restless impulse towards 
truth above the complete possession of the truth itself.^ Thus 
the emphasis of Froebel upon activity is wholly in the spirit of 
German idealism during and prior to his time. Action was for 
Froebel prior to all else, because it is the condition of develop- 
ment, which for Froebel was the law of life. 

To Froebel one thing only, self-sacrifice, appeared to stand 
above development. Or rather, self-sacrifice appeared to be a 
condition of development, and even a mode of self-realisation. 
It is easy to illustrate this thought of Froebel from the philosophy 
of Hegel. For Hegel, life is a process of dying to live. By 
dying to desire and passion we live to morality, by dying to 
morality we live to institutions, by dying to institutions we live 
to self-realisation in the freedom of established observance.* 
Fichte held a similar if less institutional theory. " We must," 
he said, " according to the figure of a sacred doctrine, first die 
unto the world and be born again, in order to enter the kingdom 
of God."^ And so, to the mind of Froebel, it is in education. 
Each stage in education dies unto the next, and is taken up into 
it so that it is no longer an end so much as a means. There is 
no turning back, and no perpetuation of a transient stage. 
Everything moves,* and the law of education as of life is pro- 
gress by effort and self-sacrifice. The world of sense which lies 
about and around us is therefore not to be thought of as a limit ; 
but a means to self-realisation. So viewed, man is not its puppet- 

^Werke (Berlin, 1845). 344-5. 

^Das Urbild der Menschheit. Dresden, 181 1. p. 33. 
^Eine Duplik. Werke (Leipzig, i897">. XIII. 23-24. 
^Hegel's Sittlichkeit. 
^Werke, Berlin, 1843. II. p. 292. 

*C"f. Lessing: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Werke, Leipzig 1897. XIII- 
p. 434- 



Philosophy of Froebel. 25 

Believing as he does in the primacy of concrete activities, and 
in the essential " purposiveness of our thought and the teleological 
character of its methods,"^ Froebel is almost, in emphasis, a 
pragmatist. Pragmatism, in addition to these implications, 
appeals to utility, or rather to workableness. It appears to 
involve a functional psychology ; it will make no truce with the 
so-called " pure " thought ; it spurns the doctrine of knowledge 
for the sake of knowledge; and it rejects ethical principles that 
do not seem to actually affect conduct. That Froebel inclines 
to a pragmatic emphasis appears to be indicated by his romanti- 
cist appreciation of emotion as a factor in life and education, by 
his voluntaristic psychology, and his preoccupation with con- 
duct. Perhaps, for instance, Froebel is pragmatistic in the 
attempt to replace the analytic processes of abstract thought by 
a methodology of the constructive arts. " In the cultivation of 
the child for creative drawing," he urges, " consists the nature 
of the kindergarten."^ But Froebel probably did not conceive 
of such an opposition between theory and practice, or between 
philosophy and life, as perhaps the modern pragmatist tends to 
assume, and gallantly endeavors to heal. 

The ultimate separation of theory and practice, or thought and 
action, is inconceivable. The pragmatist emphasises not only 
practice, but theory in relation to practice. The idealist empha- 
sises the same relation, and not merely theory. Indeed, for the 
purposes of the present analysis, pragmatism may be regarded 
as one aspect of idealism. For the pragmatistic leanings of 
Froebel are to all appearance organically related to his idealistic 
philosophy of life. Human life may be viewed as an inter- 
action of knowing and doing. From this point of view, then, 
it was not mere doing that commended itself to Froebel, so much 
as the socialised activity that tends to convey to the individual 
a spiritual mastery in both the intellectual and the practical 
spheres. Indeed, it seems to follow from the notion of life as 
an interaction, that whether it be approached from the more 
theoretical, or from the more practical side, is largely a matter 
of methodology. In this broad sense, the emphasis of Froebel 
upon self-activity is a principle of method ; and may not be wholly 
inconsistent with the emphasis of Herbart upon ideas. 

^Cf. Humanism. F. C. S. Schiller, p. 9. 

^Kindergartenwesen (Seidel). p. 329. Or Education by Development, p. 88. 



^6 Herhart and Froebel. 

As a principle of methodology, Froebel preferred education 
through concrete activities to education through abstract ideas. 
This principle involves, firstly, the preparation for thoughts by 
activities; and again, the application of thoughts in activities. 

Secondly, it involves a concrete treatment of song and story, 
which are to be such as the child may make as it were into 
vehicles of his own feeling. Therefore they involve, in addition 
to self-expression, social appreciation. Stories, where possible, 
are to have an outlet in action ; and are to preserve the pleasur- 
able realism of infant drama.^ 

Thirdly, Froebel would emphasise the constructive arts, less 
with Rousseau from industrial motives, than because he per- 
ceived in the creative activities something divine, as God him- 
self is primarily creator. " In order to understand the Creator, 
man must be in a position to create after him, man must himself 
be relatively a creator."- 

Fourthly, education by doing implies at least a respect for 
what may be called the natural methodology of the child. 
" Watch, only watch, the child himself will teach you."^ Or 
again : " Let us learn of our children, let us hearken to the 
gentle admonitions of their life, and the unvoiced demands of 
their spirit."* Only upon the surface do such expressions, fre- 
quent as they are in Froebel, imply an education according to 
nature, where nature means mere origin as with the genetic psy- 
•chologist, mere primitivism as with Rousseau. Their real func- 
tion, it may not be too much to say,^ is to assert a neglected 
factor in the education process, the ground and promise of indi- 
viduality, the child with his instincts and impulses. The teacher, 
then, is not just concerned with the child's individuality, or with 
the needs of society alone ; but rather with the process in which 
both the child and society function. He is neither to appear 
Ijefore the child as the champion of a relentless society, and its 
mysterious demands, clad in the terrors with which it has invested 
him ; nor is he contrariwise to lackey the child's perfections. He 
is not as one set over dead materials. He is set over a living 
process, a process which he directs as best he can, by here a 

'Cf. Menschen Erziehung (Seidel). p. 196. 

'From Froebel's Eisoy (Erfurt, 1821). Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. p. 170. 

^Menschen Erziehung. p. 46. 

*Ibid. p. s6. 

*Cf. note on p. 11. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 27 

touch, there a suggestion, yonder an exercise, according to the 
opportunities with which his Hving trust may furnish him. 

Fifthly, it accords with the method of activity, that a teacher 
need not answer every question as it arises, if he but put the 
child in the way to answer it for himself.^ Felt problems are a 
storage battery of educational power. Indeed Froebel would 
suggest that they are more, as it were the leaven that leavens the 
whole lump. " In all instruction," he says, " we should start 
from an inner need of the boy." Froebel adds the charge, that 
we are prone to this fault, " to teach and instruct our children 
without having awakened the want of it, yes, after we have 
destroyed whatever was already in the child."^ From these few 
corollaries of Froebel's method, then, this much at least may be 
taken as certain, that for him the school is no spot set apart for 
the learning of lessons, but an institution pregnant with social 
life. 

4. The reign of lazv. It is implied in what has been said of 
the moral life, that idealism demands a reign of law, a moral 
order, a more than subjective standard of self-realisation. A 
reign of law seems implied both in ethical idealism, which sees 
life as guided by its idea ; and by metaphysical idealism, which 
regards the world as constituted by spirit. For apart from law 
in the constitution of the world there can be neither truth nor 
agreement ; and apart from law in the moral sphere there can be 
no goodness, because no standard of virtue; the choice is there- 
fore only between law and a self-destructive scepticism, such as 
is prone to assume a standard of truth and right in order to 
prove that none exists. Froebel began and ended with the 
notion of law.' In the natural world, indeed, the reign of law 
is sufficiently proven. But so-called natural laws have a spirit- 
ual aspect; since they exist only to a reflective being, and are 
indebted for their intelligibility to the impress of spiritual activi- 
ties. They are valid of course for animals, but not to them ; one 
can only say that they are valid for them to us. But man has 
made nature a realm of law to himself, though willy-nilly it 
would be so for himself. While law indeed reigns, he endeavours 
by reformations and occasional rebellions to transmute its despot- 
ism into the endurable form of a limited monarchy. Personal 

^Menschen Erziehung. hrsg. Seidel. p. ss- 

^Ibid. p. 155. 

^Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. p. i6s and p. i68. 



28 Herbart and Froehel. 

autonomy may be actualised to the extent of one's self-conscious- 
ness, with which comes a measure of freedom, a quantum of 
control, an element of responsibility, and the necessity and intel-^ 
ligibility of the moral sense. 

According to the notion of the reign of law, though there be 
many forms of self-activity, many modes of self-expression, there 
is in general only one right form, only one best mode, in any 
given set of circumstances that may be said to have a moral 
bearing. This principle is perhaps the root of the social influ- 
ence of idealism. The idea that guides our lives is to be the 
best, the right idea, so far as we can locate it ; and normally 
such an idea is likely to be socially beneficial, because it can- 
not but be socially constituted. And, although Kant had 
established the ethics of idealism on the basis of a categorical 
imperative, or a call of duty needing no other justification than 
itself, yet, to all intents and purposes, his canons of ethics gave 
the reasons, the necessity for which he had repudiated, for the 
individual to fulfil his social duty. The individual is to act 
always as though he were both legislator and subject in a republic 
of ends. And certainly for Froebel the moral law was not merely 
a superposed divine injunction. Without losing its divine 
authority, it was for Froebel an inner law, a mode in which the 
divine immanence is actualised. " The exercise, the development 
of man as an intelligent, thinking, self-conscious being to the 
pure, unimpaired manifestation of the inner lazv . . . and 
the production of the way and means thereto, is the education 
of man."^ 

5. Freedom. For Rousseau, who struck a chord to which all 
Europe responded, freedom was on the whole absence of fetters, 
and the way to it the removal of them. Be the shackles of 
whatever kind, whether political, ecclesiastical, or social, to the 
mind and to the principles of Rousseau they were unendurable. 
Social habits were detrimental, social institutions retrogressive, 
social conventions baneful, social influences uneducational. The 
American Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Robert 
Burns, the utterances of the French revolutionaries, the storm 
and stress movement in Germany, and in a way romanticism 
itself, all were more or less dominated by conceptions of freedom 
derived from these. Such conceptions to a degree suggest the 

^Menschen Erziehung (Stidel, 1883). Einleitung. p. 4. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 29 

fundamental fallacy that individuals and society are somehow 
separable. To the romanticist the individual, if he were but 
individual enough, was the all in all; and the genius a law unto 
himself. Yet there were in romanticism saving elements of 
sociality. Especially, romanticism emphasised that common and 
democratic aspect of life, feeling ; and it cherished an esthetic 
appreciation that is often not far from sympathy. These motives, 
strengthened as they were in his case by a Fichtean sense of 
duty and by Christianity, may have sufficed to carry Froebel 
over from Rousseau's position to a more positive ground. For 
Froebel, freedom is the willing fulfilment of imperative ends 
that are at once divine and human.'^ 

It has to be admitted, not indeed that wrongdoing is or can 
be freedom, but that freedom involves the possibility of wrong- 
doing. Children may be so shielded, every burden of responsi- 
bility so assumed for them by parents, that never having truly 
willed they lose the normal capacity for willing. They submit 
themselves to an external authority without the opportunity of 
identifying themselves with it, or making it their own ; and here 
is illustrated Rousseau's contribution to a true notion of freedom, 
that it is too much to expect a rational being to manifest slavish 
obedience to laws regarded as externally imposed. Fichte even 
adds that the law should say to the student : " So far as I am 
concerned, thou may est leave the path of right and follow after 
evil, no other harm shall overtake thee but to be despised and 
scorned, despised even by thyself when thou turnest thine eye 
inward. If thou wilt venture on this peril, venture on it with- 
out fear."^ 

Even when the doctrine of implicit obedience, which has been 
a pretext for the ready and easy way of corporal punishment, has 
been rejected, the educator is still in a dilemma, to escape which 
he must make up his mind upon the question of the freedom of 
the will. If the will be in some sort free, then one should 
develop it with Froebel ; but if not, then one may try to build it 
up, with Herbart, by deliberate presentations. 

On the one hand every man has a consciousness of freedom. 
He determines to do a thing, and he does it. Evidence of this 
kind is as abundant, and perhaps as valid, as the contrary evi- 

*Cf. e. g. Mutter und Kose-Lieder. Schlusslied. 

^Werke. Berlin, 1845. VI. p. 409. or Popular Works. London, 1873. p. 193. 



30 Hcrhart and Frocbel. 

dence for the " inertia of matter."^ It would seem to be the 
case that man 7)iay drift along as flotsam and jetsam idl}^ tossed 
on the surface of a sea of being ; but that he is free to the extent 
to which he uses his freedom. His potential freedom, as such, 
is a vain thing ; made kinetic, it is the dearest treasure of his 
inheritance. 

Freedom was for Kant and Fichte transcendental, capable of 
giving a veto to the whole world of sense and the desires origi- 
nating out of it. To this view Herbart found himself unable to 
subscribe.^ Given certain circumstances, it seemed to him that 
a man must act in a particular way. Between these views the 
truth may lie. Perhaps given certain circumstances and a cer- 
tain character a man will act in a particular way, but what of 
the play of self-determination in the formation of the character 
itself? The character also, says the determinist, is determined 
by past combinations of circumstances. Still, in each act that 
made the character there was from the beginning a reaction of 
mind in its own way. To account for the origin of mental 
reactions the determinist refers to heredity. Even this can only 
mean that until the child becomes self-conscious he is determined, 
as an animal is determined. To this argument the rejoinder is, 
that even an animal has an inner principle of independence ; and 
that, with self-consciousness, there is given the possibility of 
emancipation in the power of setting up ideals. It is not per- 
haps in the purely transcendental sense, the Kantian sense of 
sheer independence, that man is free, so much as by progressive 
achievement. According to this view, there is in man a capacity, 
or the germ of a capacity, for transcending the fierce compul- 
sions of external nature. If not free, man is in process of 
becoming free, and as such by no means a slave. 

One of the arguments for free will is that morality presup- 
poses the possibility of achieving it. In Kant's phrase, thou 
canst because thou oughtest. What ought is not consequent on 
what is, but what is upon what ought. Morality thus bears its 
own warrant ; it is autonomous. " Whatever number of motives 
nature may present to my will, whatever sensuous impulses — the 
moral ought it is beyond their power to produce."^ Moral con- 

'C/. Gibson, The Problem of Freedom. In Personal Idealism. London, 1902. pp. 139— 
192. 

^Pddagogische Schrifteti. hrsg. Sallwurlc. 1891. II. p. 203. 
^Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin, 1889). pp. 446-447. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 31. 

trol is therefore self-control. Freedom, the ideal freedom after 
which man struggles, is self-limited only ; though in dealing with, 
his fellows, as Fichte suggests, the voice of conscience utters the 
command : " Here set a limit to thy freedom ; here recognise 
and reverence purposes which are not thine own." 

It was Hegel who got furthest away from the notion of free- 
dom which was implied in Rousseau's doctrine of the relation 
of the individual to society. For Rousseau, freedom appears 
to have consisted fundamentally in the absence of institutional 
control. But Hegel conceived the principle of freedom by insti- 
tutions. For Hegel, man rises not so much in spite of his limi- 
tations as by them. Those limits of which at times he complains, 
his body and the world of sense, are the means of actualising his 
capacity for freedom. The world of nature which constrains 
him becomes by degrees his servant. Krause had claimed that 
finitude is no evil, limitation not an imperfection; and that it is 
just in order that men may participate with individuality in the 
being and all-perfectness of God, that they come to exist in 
determinate form, bound, and limitation.^ In the same spirit, 
though in the field of poetry, Browning would have the bodies 
of men to be none other than they are, organs for the fulfilment 
of natural destinies, perverted by no " mad wings." And if the 
body be the vehicle rather than the fetter of the mind, in just 
the same way, from this point of view, are institutions not the 
limits of freedom so much as the means of realising it. Institu- 
tions transmit to individuals a certain social control over experi- 
ence. Indeed, we realise ourselves not in so far as we are not 
interfered with by family, school, church or state, but in so far 
as we endeavor to utilise these and other institutions for the 
moral reconquest of nature. Froebel was fully of opinion that 
man becomes free by the elevation of physical necessity into 
moral law,^ and he is so far, as it were, Hegelian and institutional, 
rather than a mere advocate of spontaneities. 

In the few cases, indeed, where Froebel appears to be no more 
than a disciple of Rousseau, and to think of spontaneities as 
freedom,^ all that he means may be that law is not something 
alien or external to man. Froebel believed in law as an inner 
thing, an element in man that is primary and divine, a repro- 

^Das Urbild der Menschheit (Dresden, 1811). p. 6. 

^Cf. Schlusslied, and Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel, pp. 165-8. 

^E. g. Menschen Erziehung. p. 46, p. 56, and p. 132- 



32 Herhart and Froebel. 

duction in some way, or an emanation, of the absolute spirit, and 
therefore such as finds its other self in nature, and recognises 
truth and satisfaction there. And if law does exist, though it 
be inner, the will is not as it would seem out of the reach of 
education, just as though it obeyed no law at all. According 
to this conception, though the will be viewed, as many prefer to 
view it, as a divine endowment, it may remain subject to develop- 
ment by use, or atrophy by neglect. It may even be advanced 
that, holding such a view, Froebel may be said to have met, not 
wholly without success, the challenge of Herbart : " We may 
hope that the first transcendental philosopher who is interested 
in education may be able to show for it an appropriate basis."* 
For it had not unnaturally seemed to Herbart, that if the will 
were purely transcendental, having its kingdom where time and 
space are not, utterly superior to circumstance, it could not be 
amenable to education. This objection only ceases to apply, if 
the will be becoming transcendental, if its very transcendentalism 
be less a gift than a discipline, so that its doors lie ever open to 
the influence of the occasion. 

Of the consequences of the principle of freedom for education, 
one of the first is respect for individuality. " We have nothing 
else to do but to let live the individual nature of the child, and 
to carefully remove whatever might involve its destruction."^ 
Perhaps a prerequisite for this attitude is faith in the possibilities 
of man as man, possibilities human, social, and as Froebel would 
add, divine. 

A somewhat democratic tone in the school seems to be another 
implication of the doctrine of freedom. Froebel's ideas and those 
of democracy have as it were a common basis, in that they rest 
upon the conception, which is the debt of both to Rousseau, of 
the worth of man as such, or if you will of the sacredness of 
individuality. And if their ethical basis be thus identical, so also 
is the logic of their method, which may be said to depend upon 
the principle that the development of a power can only be 
secured by using it. The child has to exercise determinations, 
though he make mistakes in so doing; and the voter needs the 
opportunity to vote, and claims it, imperfect though his judg- 

^Pddagogische Schriften (Sallwiirk, i8qi). II. p. 203. 
^Menschen Erziehung (Seidel). p. 152. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 33 

ment may be, that he may learn in its exercise to use it to the 
best advantage. 

A third impHcation of freedom is perhaps, in the light of the 
previous discussion, pragmatically truest of all for education. 
It is exercise in the voluntary discharge of obligations. For 
there is little manner of doubt as to the kind of individual to be 
developed. He is to be the socialised individual, the function- 
ing individual, the individual whose point of view is not that of 
a self located in the body alone, but of a corporate situation ; and 
especially he is to be all this not by virtue of an external com- 
pulsion, but by free choice and a good will nourished by the 
assimilation of many opportunities. And so the boy is to be 
trained to take up his future calling, not in gloom and compul- 
sion, but rejoicing in its prosperity, and securing in the circle 
of his activity, contentment.^ 

Fourthly, freedom in the school lends itself to national influ- 
ences. In Prussia, kindergartens were suppressed by a reac- 
tionary government in 1851 on the ground that they expressed 
revolutionary tendencies. And, although it is true that an ele- 
ment of misunderstanding had entered into the edict, to a certain 
extent kindergartners may be justified in looking back at the 
occurrence with pride. From their standpoint of contemporary 
security, they may be entitled to regard it as an admission of a 
genuine democratic principle in the kindergarten. The govern- 
ment of Prussia objected to enthusiasm, objected to freedom of 
development, and preferred methods of authoritative tutelage 
to principles of self-activity. What has the spirit of autocracy 
in common with the burning words of one of Froebel's mani- 
festoes? "Now, therefore, we hereby invite all German wives 
and maidens to unite with right German enthusiasm in founding 
and developing a General Institution for the complete culture of 
child life up to school age. We claim their help, in a genuine Ger- 
man spirit, in one common effort to found and develop the German 
Kindergarten."^ Indeed, any appeal to the democratic element 
of social feeling is apt to have a national and political bearing. 

Fifthly, freedom in education seems to mean that instincts 
and impulses are to be utilised, not eliminated. For these are 
the obvious contributions of the self to the educative process. 

^Menschen Erziehung (Seidel). pp. 163-4. 

^Friedrich Froebels Kindergarten-Brieje (Wien und Leipzig 1887). pp. 132-3. Trans- 
lated N. Y. 1806. 



34 Herbart and Froebel. 

If they be not respected, or in some way maintained, it is diffi- 
cult to see how there should be talk of freedom. Yet it is one 
thing to respect instincts and impulses, and another to admire 
them as they blindly perform an unassisted work. But, if free- 
dom may be defined in terms of the realisation of an inner prin- 
ciple, so that it nowise contradicts law, but harmonises with it 
in the principle of development ; then instincts and impulses may 
be thought of not as the opposites to ends, ideals or values, so 
much as the possibilities and cravings for these very realisations 
and satisfactions.^ The educational situation ought then to be, 
not impulses versus the curriculum, but impulses for it. And, if 
freedom be definable as self-control, or even the control of the 
experiential process in which the self is a terminal factor, it 
will be even possible to speak of educating impulses to freedom. 

Sixthly, so far as this point may be differentiated from the 
last, the notion of a psychological method seems bound up with 
the principle of freedom. Psychology is developing a genetic 
tendency to look trustfully to original instincts and impulses, 
and to let them have free sway. If one may be permitted to set 
up a temporary methodological distinction between the curric- 
ulum and method of the school, as it were between social 
demand and individual channels of supply, then the method of 
the school tends to recognise freedom by catering to individual 
impulses and modes of agency. 

Again, since freedom has nothing in common with force or 
fear, it means finally that in the schoolroom love is to preside. 
It is a message of Froebel to teachers that the great formative 
influence is love. Love never violates the sanctities of freedom, 
has no machine methods, scorns the mere equipoise of intellect 
without emotion, discloses personality, and imparts that vital 
touch of the divine which is all that is needed to sound the 
strings of the harp of character. This is why Froebel's mes- 
sage is principally to women, in whose hands the destiny of 
nations is said to lie. " The minors must come of age in our 
time, and they are above all the women and children, whose 
human worth has hitherto not been recognised in full measure."^ 
The love of Froebel for humanity as such was founded upon 
his religious views, and his faith in the Absolute Spirit. 

^Cf. Menschen Ersiehunp (Seidel). p. 4, p. 152, etc. 

^Erinnerungen an Friedruh Froebel. Bulow. Kassel 1876. p. 4. Said to be Froebel'i 
words. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 35 



III. 

German Idealism led up to an Absolute which was somewhat 
differently conceived by the founders of various philosophical 
systems, although the differences may have been more in emphasis 
than perhaps in essence. All the founders of systems were 
agreed that the Absolute was spiritual, that is to say on the 
highest level of being; that it was self-conditioning, and con- 
tained in itself the principle of its own explanation; and that it 
was constitutive of life and nature, and manifested in them. 
For Schelling the Absolute was a ground of Identity^ of mind 
and things, an almost esthetic unity. For Fichte it was rather 
an universal Moral Order,^ for Hegel unifying Will or person- 
ality,^ and for Froebel the Christian God, regarded as there is 
reason to believe theistically, rather than pantheistically as was 
alleged against him in his lifetime.* 

I. God, as absolute ground of all things. For Froebel, God, 
up to whom Idealism may be said to lead by no uncertain path,^ 
is the absolute ground of all things.'' Idealistic philosophy used 
the phrase, the Absolute, to express the unconditionally real 
spirit. The Absolute is often identified with God, although there 
are those who would with some show of reason include in the 
Absolute all spiritual individualities ; while others prefer to regard 
the absolute spirit not as perfected, so much as working itself 
out in the processes of the natural world. Possibly, in as much 
as the term Absolute seems so liable to a diversity of interpreta- 
tions, it may be preferable, at least in relation to an educational 
issue, to substitute for it the name of God. 

From Kant to Hegel there is a development in the apprecia- 
tion of things divine. Kant's conception of God was largely 
deistic or dualistic. In other words, it would seem that for his 
metaphysic, in which right and good were autonomous,'^ God 
was somewhat externally postulated. But for Fichte, God may 
perhaps have stood in a closer relation to humanity, at least if 
any reliance is to be placed on the terms Moral Order, consti- 

^Cf. e. g. Werke. Stuttgart und Augsburg. 1859. IV. p. 103. 
^Cf. e. g. Werke. Berlin, 1845. II. p. 299. 
^Cf. Caird's Hegel, pp. 127-8 

*Erinnerungen an Friedrich Froebel. Biilow. Kassel, 1876. p. 4. 
*C/. Wallace, Kant. Edinborough and London, 1886. pp. 120, 189. 
^Cf. Menschen Erziehung. Opening paragraphs. 

'Cf. MacVannel, Educational Theories of Herbart and Froebel. 1905. p. 85. In Teachtrs 
College Contributions to Education. 



36 Herbart and Froebel. 

tutive and combining Energy, the only true Self,^ the Will that 
" binds me in union with himself," that " also binds me in union 
with all finite beings like myself, and to the common mediator 
between us all."- The Romanticists thought of God often as 
the great artist, indwelling or immanent in his work. Possibly 
even this view may have a certain suggestiveness when set over 
against a dualistic deism that opposes God to nature. If so, 
Schelling's pantheism may be more than a system of perversions. 
Certainly, at every point it influences Froebel, above all in the 
notion of the unity of nature, and of God as the bond of unity.* 
And yet, in Froebel there seem to be suggestions of the divine 
transcendence as well as immanence ; as though in his heart he 
were seeking a theistic synthesis, or a transcendental-immanental 
reconciliation of his pantheistic leanings with the Hegelian notion 
that the Absolute is not substance but subject. For Hegel, God 
was not so much an immanent Feeling, as for Schelling; but 
much more Will, a Man of war, a Spirit that is not only unity, 
but unity holding in itself all differences, and for ever active 
in their interpretation.* 

Many have thought that Froebel failed to sufficiently discrim- 
inate his philosophy, religion, and education. Perhaps what at 
first sight seems to be confusion may reward the careful student 
by manifesting itself as an efficient harmony. Doubtless Froe- 
bel's bias was mystic, probably his syntheses were at times based 
on inadequate analyses ; but of what constructive mind can this 
not be said, and is the word confusion applicable? At any rate 
it seems doubtful whether a few critical defects should be 
allowed to obscure the vigour and efficiency that are the fruits 
of a unitary organisation of the attitudes of the soul. In other 
words, Froebel may have been a better educator because he 
knew how to harmonise his philosophy and his religion. And 
therefore, if the comparison may be made without odium, to 
whatever extent Froebel may have been weaker than Herbart 
on the side of the critical reason, it was much that he should 
have been the stronger in faith, feeling and intuition. Critically, 
philosophy and religion may lie far asunder; vitally they can- 

iCf.^Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Boston, 1892. p. 162. 
^Sdmmtliche Werke. Berlin, 1845. II p. 290. 

3"This Unity is God." See opening paragraphs of the Education of Man. 
^Compare the conclusion of Hegel's Logic. Harris. Chicago, 1890. 



Philosophy of Froehel. 37 

not. Philosophy, says Hegel, only unfolds itself while it unfolds 
religion ; and while unfolding itself it unfolds religion. 

Froebel's system of education was all bound up with religion. 
True, he had little concern with the problem of teaching children 
of diverse religious denominations, although few educators, per- 
haps, have passed through more bitter experiences of sectarian 
rancour. Yet this modern problem, delicate as it is, seems to 
have only an indirect bearing upon Froebel's thesis that religion 
should pervade the school curriculum ; nay, that it should begin 
at the mother's knee. Meaning by religion anything but dogma, 
Froebel entertained no fear that it might unduly perplex even 
the youngest child. On the contrary, he maintained, it is 
because we do not instruct on inner things that they might under- 
stand, but only on outer things that they do not understand, that 
the life and soul of older boys tend to be as empty as they are.^ 
" Inner " things seem to mean things after which the soul hun- 
gers, among them the love and the will of God. Rousseau would 
have kept Emile for many years ignorant of God's name. But 
for Froebel it was the task of instruction, in his own words, " to 
bring into the consciousness of the scholar the unity of all things 
and the repose, being and life of all things in God, so that in 
time he may be able to act according to this consciousness."^ 

2. Pantheism. Possibly for the purposes of the present analy- 
sis almost enough has already been said about the pantheistic 
leanings of Froebel.^ He did not consider himself to be a pan- 
theist.^ It may none the less be true that in these matters the 
individual is not his own best critic, and that Froebel's categorical 
repudiation of the tenet avails litt)e in a dispassionate analysis 
of his creed. And yet perhaps it may serve, in conjunction with 
the tenor of his teaching, to indicate that if his faith may have 
been pantheistic, it was not with the attenuated pantheism that 
society holds in reproach. Froebel may have been pantheistic 
to the extent of an ample breadth of realisation of the divine 
immanence in nature, without sacrificing much of the intensity 
of the Christian notion of a personal God. He may have seen 
no more reason against a combined immanence and transcendence 
in the deity than in the nature of the human consciousness. If 

^Menscken Erziehung (Seidel 1883). pp. 169-70. 

^Ibid. p. 80. 

^See preceding section. 

*Erinnerungen an Friedrich Froehel. Bulow. Kassel, 1876. pp. 28-9. 



38 Herbart and Froebel. 

this were so, perhaps he may have had the right to emphasise 
immanence or transcendence at will. If it be possible to arrive 
at a narrower definition, it is not improbably this; that when 
Froebel thinks of humanity, God appeals to him rather as trans- 
cendent but sympathetic spirit; and when he thinks of nature, 
then God appeals to him chiefly as immanent spirit. It is in 
somewhat different terms that Froebel himself is reported to have 
repudiated the doctrine of pantheism. Pantheism, said he, 
practically views the world as God's body. Personally he dis- 
claimed such an opinion. God is not in the world, he maintained, 
but the world is in God.^ In a word, Froebel's position was 
that which Krause used to call panentheism. That the world is 
somehow in God does not seem gravely unorthodox; it may be 
a sort of reconciliation between pantheism and transcendentalism ; 
and if it be an essentially pantheistic position, it is also more than 
pantheistic. 

So fundamental is the notion of the divine immanence to 
Froebel's thought, and so vital to his educational theory, that 
it would have to be treated at much greater length had not this 
been already done in the section upon Froebel's theory of 
nature. But, as the case stands, it may suffice to recall by mere 
phrases certain educational implications to which attention has 
already been given. Perhaps these are especially (a) the culti- 
vation of a human sympathy with nature, (b) the recognition 
of the unity of her processes in all her kingdoms, (c) the sub- 
jection of nature to spiritual laws, and all that this involves 
for conduct and method, and (d) the partial justification of an 
emphasis upon universal laws, even in the kindergarten. Per- 
haps only the last of these points demands a more specific 
explanation. A divine immanence means at least that all things 
are related; that the Absolute, the whole, is somehow involved 
in every part; and that consequently there may be a certain 
philosophic basis for symbolism in education. 

3. Teleology. Froebel's theory of the divine element in edu- 
cation, broadly viewed, presents another aspect for discussion, 
that of teleology. Teleology, perhaps, may fairly be identified 
with ethical idealism, and again with the Aristotelian concep- 
tion of final cause.2 In a way it is the supreme factor in ideal- 

^Erinnerungen, etc., p. 28 as above. 

'Aristotle, Physics. Books I and II. Metaphystcs, I. m. i. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 39 

ism, because of the bond which it establishes between the ideal 
and the real, between realised and struggling spirit, between 
the divine and human, between Plato's pattern laid up in heaven 
and the Aristotelian process of becoming on earth. Teleology 
ventures to affirm that it is only the end which can explain the 
process that moves toward it ; and that true cause is not so much 
the sum of pre-existing necessary and sufficient conditions as 
the purpose or end which calls forth the whole process. Accord- 
ing to Idealism one may even expect a necessary connection 
between the notions of efficient or scientific, and final or tele- 
ological, cause. For the efficient cause of any change, which is 
the sum of all the relevant pre-existing conditions, seems ulti- 
mately to become indistinguishable from the constitution of the 
universe at large. How many thousand factors in the universe 
enter into the constitution of man? But if then the universe 
be structurally the efficient cause, so also must it not be the 
effect? It would seem to follow, as the doctrine of the con- 
servation of energy more clearly indicates, that true change is 
less in matter than in meaning. But the notion that change, 
or if one may put upon the word change an optimistic interpre- 
tation, progress, is a growth in fulness of meaning, would appear 
to imply that explanations should come rather from ends than 
origins, simply because the ends or realisations manifest the 
major significance. And this again is teleology. The stuff, as 
possibility, remains ; but progress is through new forms, ideas, 
meanings and relations.^ Teleology perhaps implies the postu- 
late of healthy optimism, that the best is the true. It will decline 
to interpret man by the brute that he may have sprung from, 
preferring to interpret the brute by a supplementary reflux of 
light from man. It will affirm that Rousseau was mistaken in 
his appeal to nature in the sense of origin, because man is more 
true, more real, more valid than nature, in the sense that he is 
relatively her most significant realisation. As against all appeals 
to primitivism, teleology involves an unequivocal faith in pro- 
gress and a dynamic theory of life.^ God, said Froebel, has not 

^Cf. Bosanquet's characterisation of cause as "change in the permanent," in the 
concluding chapter of his "Essentials of Logic." 
^Expressed by Schiller in his poem, Hoffnung: 

"Es ist kein leerer, schmeichelnder Wahn, 
Erzeugt im Gehime des Thoren, 
Im Herzen kiindet es laut sich an: 
Zu was Besserm sind wir geboren; 
Und was die innere Stimme spricht, 
Das tauscht die hoffende Seele nicht." 



40 Herbart and Froebel. 

placed man on the narrow path of imitation, but on the broad 
road of development.^ It may fairly be admitted that Froebel's 
theory of development is teleological throughout, both because, 
on the one hand, he is confident that the free unfolding of the 
activities of the self will tend to the realisation of ideal or divine 
purposes ; and also for this further reason, that he finds in these 
purposes a standard for the interpretation of the education pro- 
cess. Education aims at bringing the soul into conscious har- 
mony with the development in which it functions and lives. The 
well-educated man, it might be submitted, is literally the man 
who has entered as a conscious determining agent, or as a free 
co-operative partner, into this development; who has in a sense 
taken over his own evolution, and achieved personal freedom 
along with the recognition of personal responsibilities. Morality, 
as the endeavour to transform the is into the ought, may possibly 
be described as the practice of teleology. Theoretically accord- 
ing to teleology, practically according to morality, the end to 
which all things are relative is a spiritual, divine nature, con- 
sciously achieved and realised.^ According to the doctrine of 
teleology, men as self-conscious beings are no longer merely 
impelled from behind, but also attracted from before; and even 
though their ideals may be in a sense the products of a past, 
this is made possible because their past itself stood in an organic 
relation to spirit, and is only explicable in the light of a present 
and future. 

Teleology is almost in itself a philosophy of education. It 
connects, as education must, two terminal aspects of a unitary 
process. It indicates a vital relation between possibilities and 
realisations, between powers and values, between instincts and 
thoughts, between impulses and freedom. It shows dimly, per- 
haps, but still it shows, what the child is to man, what man to 
the child. As an aspect of evolution, it seems to reconcile the 
Pestalozzian standard of the development of given powers with 
more obviously social and vicarious ends. But teleology is not 
only the condition of the possibility of education ; it is also a 
ground of the activity of the teacher in the educative process. 
One may none the less freely grant a sense in which education 
is passive, following, because the natural impulses of the child, 

^Menscken Erziehung, hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 11. 
^Menschen Erziehung, hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 23. 



Philosophy of Froebel. 41 

possibly by their pre-natal education in the race and in the 
species, clamor on the whole for social satisfactions, and are 
only wayward in their marginal vagaries. And yet the principal 
message of teleology to education is to be positive. If conscious- 
ness have any pragmatic validity, any use, if it be more than a 
mere " epiphenomenon ; " then the teacher, representing the social 
consciousness, will have to interfere and keep on interfering rela- 
tively to a consciously conceived end. To the realisation of 
this end everything else, even development, is subordinate. Thus 
a teleological theory of education, to be rational, may be said to 
subordinate and subject development itself to the idea of devel- 
opment. This is precisely what Froebel would do in his attempt 
to make family education conscious; and to raise it from the 
level of an instinctive process to that of scientific method. 

Indeed, the moment reflection comes into play, to make devel- 
opment itself the end is meaningless. For the question is at once 
asked, what is this development that is made the end, and the 
answer is necessarily in terms of an idea of it. Man cannot 
well escape from the use of his reason ; he must think, and in 
thinking set up a standard of what he conceives the true nature 
of development to be. This is as true for a metaphysical realist 
like Herbart as for a metaphysical idealist like Froebel. Ethic- 
ally, Herbart is perhaps as good an idealist as Froebel, in aiming 
as he does at a many sided interest and a good will. But there 
are those who find a greater discrepancy between the metaphys- 
ical and ethical positions of Herbart than those of Froebel. For 
Froebel the origin is God, and the end God ; so that for him the 
whole process of life has a spiritual, and one may almost say a 
religious, character. For Herbart the origin is independent 
reality, and the end phenomenal morality — a difficult transition. 

The final word in this preliminary interpretation of Froebel 
is that his central thought was guidance. Sometimes he seems 
to say with Rousseau, follow nature; sometimes with Hegel, co7i- 
trol nature. " Follow nature " means with Froebel not only to 
foreswear force and to remove hindrances; it means also that 
there is a positive social and " divine " tendency in instincts and 
impulses themselves. " Control nature " means that this mere 
tendency to the good is to be consciously cherished, guided, and 
improved. To follow nature is as it were to look at education 
from the side of origin, or genetically. But Froebel saw values 



42 Herbart and Froebel. 

too, and set them above origins. " Without rational, conscious 
guidance," he is reported to have said, " the activity of the child 
degenerates into idle games (Spielerei), instead of preparing for 
the tasks of life unto which it is destined."^ 

It would almost seem from the above analysis that, since 
Froebel, we have not so much to add to his teaching, or even to 
correct it, as to evolve from it a completed philosophy of educa- 
tion. Yet there is perhaps in his teaching at times an ambiguity, 
at times a hyper-symbolism, at times an imperfection. The way 
to escape the dangers of these and the like faults, which are in 
general rather tendencies than faults properly so called, is to 
study another philosophy of education, the philosophy of Her- 
bart. This will be found to be largely antithetic to Froebel's, 
and yet in such a way that the two philosophies are to a large 
extent the complements of one another. 

Before turning to Herbart, one may perhaps pay a final tribute 
to Froebel's contribution to a philosophy of education. His chief 
ideas, of self-activity as the force operative in education, of 
development as the process of education, of freedom as the path 
of education, and duty or service as the standard of values for 
education, these have all stood the test of time unchanged except 
in their development to a richer concreteness. Accordingly it is 
difficult for an idealist to read Froebel without feeling himself to 
be fundamentally a Froebelian. Let his philosophy savour as it 
will of eclecticism from Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Krause, let 
his practical recommendations fall short as they must of the 
counsel of perfection, still it is impossible not to perceive a 
fundamental unity in his philosophy and a fundamental truth in 
his practice. His voice is the voice of a prophet and a reformer. 
His theory may be said to center about that maxim of idealism, 
or rather if you will of teleology, the best is the true, as his prac- 
tice lives in his own motto. Come let us live for our children. 

^Erinnerungen an Friedrich Froebel. Bulow. Kassel, 1876. p. 45. 



CHAPTER II. 

The Philosophy of Herbart. 

It may be said of Herbart that, unlike Froebel, he stepped out 
of the line of development from Kant to Hegel in order to fashion 
a link in another and a divergent chain. For it is possible to 
distinguish two modes of the post-Kantian philosophical devel- 
opment. The idealism of Kant was developed by Fichte, Schel- 
ling, and Hegel ; and his realism by Herbart, Beneke, and Lotze. 
It may be indicated how logical and perhaps inevitable this bifur- 
cation was. To go back to the beginning, Kant had discovered 
a new mode of approach to the fundamental problem of reality. 
Instead of accepting the external or sensational as the basis of 
the interpretation of mind,- he preferred as it were to reverse the 
problem ; and, beginning with mind, to inquire how its a priori 
activities may be possible. He found that sensation can do no 
more than to furnish the raw material of thought, upon which in 
all knowledge the mind has to impose a contribution of its own. 
In this way, so far as the world of conceptions goes, Kant became 
an idealist. At the same time, he regarded his analysis as valid 
only for thought, and not for things as such. In this distinction 
lay the germ of a dualism which idealists have ever since endeav- 
oured to transcend and realists to make intelligible. There are 
those who would not think it unfair to maintain that in spirit 
Kant was an idealist, and only by reservation a realist. Others, 
among whom must be reckoned Herbart, held that the Kantian 
dualism between the real and the rational is fundamental and 
metaphysically irreducible. Ultimate reality consists for this 
school in a plurality of independent reals, unknowable, because 
other than the phenomena registered or capable of being regis- 
tered by consciousness. To this position Herbart stood faithful, 
unable to subscribe to the idealistic construction which Fichte 
based upon Kant's Critique of Judgment. " In one word," as 
Herbart declares in the preface to his AUgemeine Metaphysik, 
" the author is a Kantian ... if however of the year 1828, 
and not of the times of the Categories and the Critique of Judg- 
ment, as the diligent reader will soon observe."^ 

^AUgemeine Metaphysik. Konigsberg, 1828. Vorrede, pp. xxvi. — xxvin. 



44 Herhart and Froebel. 

The realism of Herbart has nothing in common with mate- 
riahsm. The reals, the things-in-themselves, that for Herbart 
underlie the phenomenal world, may even be psychically inter- 
preted; Herbart leaves this indeterminate. Certainly Herbart 
is ethically an idealist, if idealism, ethically interpreted, mean 
the guidance of life by an idea. Further, even in the more onto- 
logical sense, Herbart is perhaps not wholly debarred by his 
realism from accepting spirit as a constitutive principle in the 
universe. For to Herbart as to Kant, time and space are sub- 
jectively determined rather than externally given. Again, Her- 
bart's reals, whether psychic or no, can by no means be materially 
conceived. Matter to Herbart is mere appearance ; and the reals 
behind it are according to Herbart's whole argument something 
heterogeneous to it, its unknown noumenal origin. The realist 
is then so far from being the materialist that he does not even 
hold matter to be real. In a sense only the idealist is a true 
believer in its reality. To put the matter in another way, 
the metaphysical question between idealism and realism may be 
said to center about the word merely, as employed in the follow- 
ing context. To the realist, the world as known is merely 
appearance. To the idealist also it is appearance ; but not 
appearance merely, because to the idealist in a sense there is 
nothing else, save appearance and its potentiality. For idealism 
reality is nothing save as related to some consciousness ; and 
again, if anything does appear to any consciousness, it must have 
reality in some way and to some degree. For a realist a thing 
is flatly real or not real, for an idealist it is real to the extent of 
its relations, for a pragmatist it is real to the extent of its func- 
tions. An idealist would say that the fact that the existence of 
the world, for a thinking subject, can only be explained on the 
basis of the rationality of nature, is not to be interpreted as 
making the world unreal, but as making its reality conceivable. 
The world that, is mere appearance to Herbart is to Froebel real 
appearance. 

This characterisation of the realism of Herbart, in contrast 
with the idealism of Froebel, is merely introductory. In the 
present chapter, the attempt will be made to treat, firstly, the 
philosophical relations of Herbart ; secondly, the principles of 
his metaphysic ; and thirdly, the foundations and the fundamental 
implications of the Herbartian psychology. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 45 



I. Herbart and Leibnitz. In the Allgemeine Metaphysik, 
Herbart begins with the remark that if he were looking for a 
stately entrance to the realm of metaphysical speculation, he could 
find it nowhere more conveniently given than in the philosophy 
of Leibnitz. For to Leibnitz the world was a thoroughly inter- 
related whole, endlessly extended, without empty space, and in 
every smallest part infinitely full of monads or individual real 
existences. It may be held therefore to consist of an infinite 
number of real parts, each monad among which is possessed of 
an incessant activity, so that according to Leibnitz no substance 
can be perfectly at rest, and no soul utterly dormant. A kind 
of perception and striving goes on, even in unreasoning monads 
or reals. For Leibnitz, again, each monad has a capacity for 
reproducing the whole in detail. Each monad is in fact a mirror 
of the world, conformably to its own status. And yet, with all 
this fulness and greatness, the real world is not regarded as 
exhausting the law of possibilities. God chose it, thought Leib- 
nitz, as the best of all possible worlds. By a single undivided 
and indivisible fiat. He raised it into reality out of the realm of 
potentialities. This metaphysic has the merits of completeness 
and suggestiveness ; and, as Herbart remarks with a touch of 
mild satire, there remained for the school of Leibnitz only one 
arduous task, such a doctrine — to prove. 

Herbart considered that the school of Leibnitz had by no means 
succeeded in establishing the principles of the Monadology. 
Even Kant's reform did not satisfy him, much less the culmina- 
tion of that reform in the idealism of Reinhold, Fichte and Schel- 
ling. All this was to Herbart as it were a period of storm and 
exhaustion, duly to be followed by renewed efforts at rehabilita- 
tion. One such effort he himself inaugurated. He believed 
that in the rehabilitation, or reconstruction, of philosophy, monads 
might well reappear, but hardly following the method or views 
of Leibnitz. Rather must the monads be reinterpreted in the 
light of the " spiritualism "^ of the newer^ psychology and the 
atomism of the newer^ chemistry. Herbart adds that contempo- 
rary idealism has served its purpose as the embodiment of a 

^Der Spiritualismus . 
2i. e. in 1828. 



46 Herbart and Froehel. 

method of transition to clearer insight.^ Possibly this may be 
granted, and yet there may be no unanimity as to what consti- 
tutes the clearer insight; whether Herbart's solution, or that of 
Hegel. 

2. Ethical viezvs. It was Herbart's contention that the older 
metaphysic, for want of determinate bound and form, had sur- 
rendered to the comparatively external influences of the empi- 
rical detail of psychology, and the science of esthetics, " especially 
its most important part, ethics."^ Ethics, as belonging to the 
world of appearance, had for Herbart no metaphysical validity, 
except in the looser sense in which the esthetic judgment may be 
called metaphysical. On the other hand with Fichte and Froebel, 
and in a sense Kant, ethics is fundamental to metaphysics, in that 
Fichte, Kant and Froebel explain and warrant that which is only 
by that which ought to be. 

Severing as he did the ethical from the metaphysical, Herbart 
could not consider the freedom of the will a strictly metaphysical 
problem, with the idealist. For Herbart, to attribute freedom 
or servitude to the will is a purely esthetic judgment; and to 
hold it to be more than this is to fall into the error of regarding 
the esthetic judgment, which concerns only the will, as if it 
indicated also the hidden ground of the will, with which it really 
has nothing to do. Herbart illustrated this so-called confusion 
from the controversy of Leibnitz and Clarke. Leibnitz said: 
"A will without motive is like the chance of Epicurus, a contra- 
dictory fiction, incompatible with the idea of will." Clarke 
replied : " The principle of action is quite separate from the 
motive." Herbart acutely pointed out that to deny motivation 
is to abolish the standard of moral worth, because the morality 
of an action could no longer be determined by the difference 
between good and evil.^ Again, Clarke insisted that nothing 
is worthy the name of action unless it may have proceeded from 
a power that was also a power not to act. To this Leibnitz 
responded that the mind that sets the weaker desire above the 
stronger is acting against itself. If Herbart inclines to one side 
or the other in this discussion, it is probably to the side of Leib- 
nitz ; but it is his feeling that Leibnitz and Clarke alike have 
failed to distinguish between the will itself, as esthetic judgment, 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 25. 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 30. 
^Ibid. Par. 31. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 47 

and its ultimate metaphysical ground. Herbart grants the will 
as it were an esthetic freedom, of the nature of a harmony 
between desire and satisfaction, but this freedom is for him noth- 
ing transcendental, nothing metaphy,sical, nothing real. The 
relation of will to motive, which Leibnitz and Clarke disputed, 
was not a real problem to Herbart. His ethical problem was 
merely the relation of will to judgment. 

To Froebel, on the contrary, morality and freedom were real 
metaphysical problems centering about the question of motiva- 
tion. It may seem hardly fair to set Froebel, with his mere 
intuition, backed by a philosophical reading and training inferior 
to Herbart's, although not to be despised, over against one of 
the keenest and subtlest of metaphysicians in a discussion con- 
cerning freedom. Indeed it is not fair unless Froebel be sym- 
pathetically interpreted. This done, Froebel seems to say: yes, 
the will is motivated, but because it makes the motive its own 
through self-identification with one of its desires, one may say 
that it is free just because it is motivated. It is ruled in a way 
by desires, but the desires are also its own. It is impelled in a 
way by circumstances, but these circumstances are so far from 
external that in the process of being converted by the self from 
apparent masters to real servants they become instrumental to 
self-realisation. 

3. The relation of Herbart to Kant. " The possible indicates 
the idea, but the real indicates the object and its position."^ 
This was the distinction by which, according to Herbart, Kant 
succeeded in effecting a revolution in metaphysic. In denying 
that the idea is the reality, Kant became the founder of modern 
realism, just as he is the founder of modern idealism by virtue 
of his demonstration that the idea is the real for us. Kant had 
held that the idea is the same, whether of a hundred real dollars 
or a hundred possible dollars, and yet the reality is different. An 
idealist might deny that the idea is the same; but from this dis- 
tinction, such as it is, Herbart takes his departure. He believed 
it to involve a true theory of reality. But how, he asks, did 
Kant apply this theory ? What has Kant posited as being f This 
is a question to which the Kantian metaphysic is dumb ; and it is 
the question which Herbart devoted himself to answer. Herein 
Herbart would supplement Kant, he would analyse the true 

'Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunjt. Par. 627. 



48 Herbart and Froebel. 

nature of reality, of noumenal being, as opposed to mere appear- 
ance, or that which is changeable and phenomenal. Thus 
whereas idealism has no use for the Ding-an-sich, the unchange- 
able and unknowable kernel of reality beneath or behind the 
phenomenal world, it is to Herbart the principal feature of the 
Kantian dialectic. Herbart only regrets that Kant has not 
analysed or explained this " true " notion of being. 

It is not to be thought that Herbart would set things on one 
side, thought on the other; and then try to get the things some- 
how into an alien mind. He did not sever objects from thought; 
he severed objects and thought alike from true being or reality. 
He was glad to think that Kant had done away with the older 
form of the metaphysical problem, so that the question was no 
longer, how do objects become intelligible to us? After the 
Kantian Critiques, says Herbart, it can no longer be held that 
things are just there, and admit of comprehension " by the on to- 
logical predicate."^ In future one may take ideas just in the 
same way as things, according as one finds them, since both the 
one and the other are for us, in us, and through us. After Kant, 
in short, the notion necessarily developed, that thought and 
things cannot except in an abstract way be separated ; that they 
are not given the one without and the other within the self, but 
both in a unity, and this unity consciousness. This would have 
been a solution grateful to Leibnitz, for whom the soul appeared 
to bring forth all ideas from an inner activity subject only to the 
regulation of a pre-established harmony. So Herbart says, and 
adds that the true diflFerence between Kant and Leibnitz con- 
sisted in this, that the Kantian theory continued to admit the 
possibility of a sense-receptivity, without being impaled upon 
either horn of the dilemma of dualism. But Kant's work had 
been essentially critical, and had not essayed a theory of being. 
" Kant's work was intended to form a Critique, but not a sys- 
tem. . . . He did not try to accomplish, what rightly 
forms the central task of metaphysics, namely to elucidate what 
is matter, and what spirit."^ That this is a fair characterisation 
is shown not only by Kant's usage of the word critique, but 
much more by the synthetic activity of both realists and idealists 
after his day, to whom he had at least as it were propounded a 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 33. 
'^Allgemeine Metaphysik. 1828. Par. 3q. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 49 

set of questions that could only be adequately answered after 
decades, if ever. 

Herbart agrees that the theory of Kant offers two ostensible 
advantages, an explanation of matter and an account of the free- 
dom of the will. Passing reference has already been made in 
this chapter to Herbart's repudiation of transcendental freedom.^ 
Nor is he more content with Kant's opinion that the substantiality 
of matter is only a form of thought, which Herbart dismisses as 
a fallacy characteristic of Kantian demi-idealism. Here it may 
be clearer to quote Herbart's own argument. " The whole 
difficulty of the idea of matter lies in this, that it should be real 
and in space.^ As real, it must consist of monads ; as in space, 
it must needs be a continuum. But these two demands are abso- 
lutely incompatible. Kant sacrificed the former; and he could 
do this easily, because according to his opinion the substantiality 
of matter is only a form of thought. The advantage of this 
view seemed very great ; for now nothing stands in the way, we 
can throw ourselves into the arms of geometry and mathematical 
physics without reserve, without closer criticism. How should 
anyone, who esteems mathematics aright, fail to be deeply 
rejoiced? . . . And yet the advantage was nothing but an 
illusion; Kant's doctrine of nature is false from beginning to 
end."^ Herbart admits the monads and denies the continuum, 
which he none the less uses as a methodological postulate. 

As to the post-Kantian philosophers, it seemed to Herbart 
that they had only made confusion worse confounded. They 
had in his opinion inextricably and disastrously commingled ideas 
that to his mind were almost disparate, the ideas namely of the 
possible, the real and the necessary. Kant had done well, 
thought Herbart, to definitely sever the notions of being and 
duty ;* but only to have them confused over again in the systems 
of his idealistic followers. Herbart agreed that Kant had also 
done well to suggest the notion of a harmony between the law 
of duty and the activity of the will. This very harmony is what 
Herbart calls inner freedom.^ So far as this definition goes, an 
idealist might agree to it, were it not that his characterisation 

•Section 2. 

^Dass sie ein rdutnliches Reales sein soil. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 39. 

*Sein and Sollen. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Konigsberg, 1828. Par. 39 (I. p. 116) 



50 Herbart and Froebel. 

of the activity of the will would differ materially from that of 
Herbart. 

Kant however probably never intended his distinction between 
Sein and Sollen to be ultimate. At any rate, having separated 
them in the Critique of Pure Reason, he brought them once more 
into a single teleological process in the more synthetic, more 
idealistic, Critique of Judgment. With the latter Critique, to 
Fichte the most inspiring of all Kant's works, Herbart had but 
little sympathy. " It refers to an ideal world wherein reality 
and duty coincide to such an extent that the first condition of all 
esthetic judgments, namely the entire severance of two members 
of a relation, and consequently the value of the harmony between 
insight and will to which reference has already been made, must 
vanish. But an ideal world, wherein moral values are reduced 
to nothing, is not for us."^ To the latter sentence an idealist 
might give in his adherence, but hardly either to the antithesis 
or rather divorce of reality and duty, or the identification of 
morality with an esthetic harmony. Meantime Herbart's argu- 
ment may perhaps be stated in the following terms. Morality 
consists in an " esthetic " harmony between knowledge and will ; 
but if the is and the ought in any sense coincide, then knowledge 
and will become identical and morality disappears. At the root 
of this reasoning seems to lie Herbart's inclination for rigid 
antitheses. For him the is and the ought are either one, or not 
one ; and he will not see with the idealist a unity in difference, or 
a good in error. Thus Herbart recognises in symbolism only a 
burden on education ; nor has he much of Froebel's faith that 
what is will naturally tend to become ivhat ought to be. 

4. The relation of Herbart to Spinoza and Leibnitz. Herbart 
looked for inspiration not only to Kant, but beyond him to 
Spinoza and Leibnitz, chiefly the latter. Spinoza had begun 
with the Cartesian view of substance, as that which exists uncon- 
ditioned by anything else. This substance is not only the cause 
of all finite things, it also is them ; and to it Spinoza gives the 
name of God. It is defined as causa sui, because the essence of 
it involves existence. This divine substance then is invested by 
the human understanding with the two attributes of matter and 
spirit, which are however merely contingent. But what of the 
specific forms in which substance is particularised? These 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Konigsberg, i8a8. Par. 39. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 51 

Spinoza calls modi. Man is a modus. Modi are to Spinoza no 
more than temporary expressions of substance, even as waves 
of the sea. They have no freedom, and only a borrowed reality. 
Mere matter, as Herbart insists, is therefore no more real to 
Spinoza than to Leibnitz or Kant. " Leibnitz arrived at monads ; 
the merely extended was not to him the true. Spinoza explained 
substance as indivisible, therefore to him also that which is 
divisible is not the true. Both united thought to the true 
(reality) ; Leibnitz set it in every individual monad, Spinoza 
in the whole. Kant . . . explained matter as mere 
appearance."^ 

Whatever then the Herbartian metaphysic may seem to imply 
for education, it turns away from materialism. For Herbart as 
for Spinoza, Kant and Leibnitz, matter is not itself real. The 
Kantian metaphysic appealed to Herbart even more than that of 
Leibnitz or Spinoza ; for it was Herbart's belief that Kant alone 
had the true idea of being or reality, which the older school had 
constructed out of essence and existence. This theory of the 
older school, because it explained reality as though reality itself 
were constituted by something behind it, was inconsistent with 
Herbart's view of reality as mere position, that is to say, as 
something merely posited, although a form of the older theory 
was not without its contemporary champion in Jacobi. The meta- 
physic of Spinoza, which lends itself so readily to an idealistic 
construction that it became an invaluable source of inspiration 
to the post-Kantian idealists, admitted of varying degrees of 
reality. The more pregnant the potentiality, the richer the 
causa immanens, the greater would the fulness of reality be. 
" Everywhere one can see the notion peeping through, that reality 
primarily reveals itself in its manifestations, in its effects; and 
therefore if it did not so show itself, it would be nothing ! "^ 
False as this Spinozistic theory may be to the principles of the 
Herbartian metaphysic, for which reality has neither degree nor 
quality, it may appear to the modern reader to anticipate in a 
remarkable way one of the fundamental positions of contemporary 
pragmatism. 

Herbart had more sympathy with Leibnitz than with Spinoza. 
Even what seemed to be errors in Leibnitz were attributed by 

^Allgerneine Metaphysik. Par. 57. 
^AUgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 72. 



52 Herhart and Froebcl. 

Herbart to the misfortune of the former in living before the 
development of a new chemistry and physics. Had Leibnitz but 
lived in post-Kantian times, he might have lost all desire to 
develop the germ of idealism, der Keim des Idealismus, that lay 
enveloped in his theory of a pre-established harmony. The ideal- 
ism of Leibnitz was hidden from himself, or at least so thought 
Herbart ; and had Leibnitz lived in a later age, his own scientific 
sympathies might have at the least alienated him from the 
romanticist school. As against Spinoza, yet conformably to the 
view of Herbart, Leibnitz ventured to be a pluralist. For him 
reality did not cleave together in an indivisible substance; but 
consisted of independent monads following their own destinies.^ 
Powerfully influenced as he admitted himself to be in his pluralism 
and realism by the atomic theory which was then supreme in chem- 
istry, Herbart believed it to imply that the independence of the 
monads might be less absolute than Leibnitz had in his own day 
imagined. In that case the pre-established harmony might have 
been dispensed with, and a better understanding might have been 
reached on the subject of the relation of mind and body. Mind 
and body according to Herbart interact, but have not the parallel- 
ism suggested by the Leibnitzian pre-established harmony or the 
Spinozistic doctrine that the order and connection of ideas is the 
same as the order and connection of things.^ 

5. The relation of Herhart to Fichte and Schelling. To Fichte 
and Schelling the unknowable residuum of reality, or the thing 
in itself, which Kant had postulated in order to explain cognis- 
able phenomena, and which Herbart had welcomed as perhaps 
Kant's chief contribution to metaphysical theory, seemed little 
more than an aberration from a truer idealism. They belonged 
to a period of which it was said that metaphysic had died heir- 
less, and the things-in-themselves had been put to auction.^ 

Fichte seems to have commanded Herbart's respect ; but not 
his adherence. Of Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre Herbart writes: 
" It is a wild landscape, but the landscape is nature."* To intro- 
duce a new problem into metaphysic, this is no small achievement, 
and this in a way is what Fichte did. His new problem was that 
of the self or Ego. Fichte held the self to be absolute. For 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 79. 

^Ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum. 

^Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging, Werden die Dinge-an-sich jetzo sub hasta 
verkaujt. 

*Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 96. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 53 

him there was no place for things-in-themselves, because the 
outer world was but a Nicht-Ich, a non-Ego, a self-set limitation. 
To Herbart on the contrary the Ego is not the whole problem 
of metaphysic. The Ego is given, is therefore possible ; and 
the object of enquiry is merely its condition. " My whole 
impulse," wrote Fichte in the Wissenschaftlehre, " is derived 
from absolute independence and self-sufficiency ; before I have 
recognised it as such I have not completely determined myself, 
nor, in contradistinction to myself, things."^ Fichte's meta- 
physical system mystically concludes in the complete annihila- 
tion of the individual, and his blending or merging in the pure 
absolute pattern of reason. Freedom may be said to be the 
cardinal principle of Fichte ; for if phenomena themselves be 
self-determined, it follows that determination by phenomena is 
only a veiled self-determination that in no wise may limit the 
transcendental self. Fichte spoke of the self as though no 
problem existed outside of it. The modern ideaHst is content 
to claim that no problem exists for the self which is unrelated 
to it. 

For Schelling, as a romanticist and almost a mystic, Herbart 
seems to feel less regard than for Fichte. Ever since Kant, he 
thought, philosophy had in a sense degenerated, but with Schel- 
ling came the deluge. " The most perverted counted now for the 
best, and Kant's authority served to fortify attempts that were 
as immature as they were visionary. "^ Yet, admitting the diffi- 
culty of interpreting Schelling aright, admitting his trick of 
leaving the common paths of reason for the by-ways of romanti- 
cism, and even admitting the consequent barbarity of his scientific 
deductions, it remains true that not only does Schelling write 
as one inspired, but also that his doctrine of nature may be 
regarded as a wholesome corrective to Fichte's subjectivism. 
Those principles which Herbart called the Schellingian preju- 
dices, that philosophy must be monistic, and that the principle 
of knowledge must be the principle of reality, are not only vital 
to Froebel's educational theory ; but probably, if rightly inter- 
preted, to idealism. Again, though to Herbart none of Schel- 
ling's principles was less welcome than unity in plurality, there 
are now few principles as assured, especially since the doctrine 

'^Cj. Herbart, Allgemeine Metaphysik. Konigsberg, 1828, Par. 96 (I. p. 282). 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 39 (Vol. I. p. 122). 



54 Herbart and Froebel. 

of organic evolution, as ideal unity in a manifold of parts. " One 
would think that with Schelling everything is possible. 
Unity in the manifold is with Schelling by no means impossible ; 
since unity is postulated, and the manifold is given."^ This is 
for Herbart a contradiction. The unity itself would have to be 
manifold, and therefore no unity. It might however be replied 
that the contradiction is verbal and logical only; that, further, 
it is transcended even in thought in the category of organism. 
Here the educator needs to choose between Herbart and Schel- 
ling ; for the notion of the one in many, unintelligible to Herbart 
but vital to Schelling and Froebel, is the principle of symbolic 
education. The argument for symbolism, very briefly recapitu- 
lated, is that the world is a system, such that the whole is implied 
in each part, and in such a way that the implication is dis- 
cernible at least for the man of genius. Possibly one may set 
over against this theory, without destroying it, the guarded 
empiricism of Herbart's attitude towards nature. " The true 
nature-seeker," Herbart writes, " is accustomed to be anxious 
for fear that his notions may not be able to attain to the heights 
of nature. Schelling is anxious, for fear that nature may not 
reach up to his own notions. And he has reason to be so! For 
what particular attains to the whole? But, according to Schel- 
ling, what particular can fail to be the whole? Where, where 
is the unity of his bond, if nature will not obey, if it will not ful- 
fil the expectations of the man of genius ? "^ 



H. 

Having now an idea of the philosophical relations of Herbart, 
one may proceed to an analysis of his metaphysic. For the psy- 
chology and the educational theory of Herbart are not ultimately 
intelligible apart from his theory of reality and his theory of 
knowledge. The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, will be 
found to be connected not only with the theory of reality, or 
ontology ; but also, and that in an intimate way, with the Her- 
bartian psychology and education. 

I. The methodology of Herbart. The terminology of the 
metaphysic of Herbart may require a brief word of explanation. 

^Allgtmeing Metaphysik. Par. 104. 
^Ibid. Par. 107. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 55 

The subject falls, he would say, into two classes, general meta- 
physics, and applied metaphysics. The scope of applied meta- 
physics includes cosmology, psychology, and natural theology. 
Ontology, in the large sense, involves the treatment of method- 
ology, ontology proper, synechology, and eidolology. Of these, 
methodology is the treatment of principles and methods. Ontol- 
ogy proper comprises the doctrines of being, becoming, substance, 
and cause. Synechology is literally the doctrine of the contin- 
uum, including space, time, motion, and the most general appli- 
cation of these ideas to life and nature. Finally eidolology, or 
the doctrine of phenomena as such, comprises attempts to dis- 
cern how far ideas may be able to furnish us with a true cogni- 
tion. Eidolology is the virtual equivalent of epistemology. 

Herbart begins the Methodology with the remark that the dif- 
ference between the scholar on the one hand, and the teacher or 
independent thinker on the other hand, is that the former is con- 
tent to see nature taken to pieces and put together again, like a 
machine, before his eyes; but not so the latter. He, the inde- 
pendent thinker, seeks to know how one may begin to find the 
real. First of all, then, he asks what is given. Is the unity of 
all things given? Yes, Froebel seems to say;^ but no, answers 
Herbart. " Neither the whole, nor the one, is given."^ But 
what then is given ? Why, answers Herbart, that which is given 
is experience. Things are brought before the mind by the psy- 
chological mechanism natural to man. They appear as com- 
plexes of attributes,^ apparently extended in space, changeable, 
doing and suffering things done. Metaphysic has to investigate 
the validity of these common sense views. To this investigation 
Herbart would attach almost a pragmatic significance. In other 
words, metaphysic is to be not only reflection ; but reflection with 
power, or comprehension. 

Philosophical reflection has at all times, says FTerbart, seen 
the given, that is to say experience, as matter and form. What 
then are the matter and form of experience, and to what extent 
may they be subject to philosophical criticism? " The matter of 
the given is feeling. This was never an object of doubt, and can 
never become so."* But, adds Herbart, the form is an object of 

'As in the opening paragraphs of the Education of Man. 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 165. 
^Complexionen von MerkmaUn. 
*Allgemeint Metaphysik. Par. 169. 



56 Herbart and Froebel. 

doubt, because it is not immediately given in the way that feehng 
is immediately given. Kant therefore did well to criticise the 
forms or categories of experience; and this, Kant's procedure, is 
also Herbart's. None the less would Herbart admit that ulti- 
mately the categories of experience are given, only not iiuuiedi- 
ately. It was his conviction that he who considers the series of 
ideas, the laws of their reproduction, and the results of their 
tendencies to complication and fusion, will come to think " that 
those systems overlook a great deal, which, bowing to idealism, 
would persuade him that the forms of experience must be deduced 
from original forms of the possibility of knowledge."^ 

Whether or no the forms or categories of the mind be an orig- 
inal factor in experience, Herbart was as convinced as Kant that 
they should be subjected to a critical investigation rather than 
be accepted at their face value. Space appears to be a merely 
relative limitation. Time is a measure of change. Causality 
itself can hardly be explained as the mere succession of ante- 
cedents and consequents. But if time, space and causation are 
not what they seem, may not this be equally true of reality ; and 
therefore, may not the current valuation of reality be subject to 
a similar discount? 

The idealists, as Herbart not unfairly suggests, must have 
reality in the soul, in consciousness. Here only, in self-con- 
sciousness, if anywhere at all, is certainty, reality and truth. 
Cogito, ergo sum. Yet, to Herbart's way of thinking, it is an 
error thus to posit one element of experience as the reality which 
explains it all. Everything that is given in experience counts 
originally for real, and its claim to reality is only suspended, not 
denied, when we find that we cannot think of it in the form in 
which it was first given. Accordingly all that is needful is that 
the notion of reality should be separated from the quality which 
is ascribed to it by the common-sense intuition. The question 
is no longer what is reality, but what sort of reality, and this is 
the problem of Herbart's Ontology.'^ In fairness to Herbart it 
may be repeated that he would begin with experience, and end 
with experience, and that his reals or monads are no more 
designed to express the meaning of the world than a scaffold 
the meaning of a building. 

^Ibid. Par. 170. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Konigbserg, 1828. Par. 192. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 57 

2. The ontology of Herbart. The Ontology opens with a 
logical criticism of the term real.'^ A ship sails by the shore. 
From her deck the trees upon land seem to move, but their 
movement is not real, while the movement of the ship is real. 
Again, paper is different from flax. The difference is real, and 
yet the paper is really one and the same with the flax, the linen, 
from which it is made. In these illustrations three realities are 
typified, those namely of a movement, and of a condition, and of 
a substance. But again, one may differentiate between a thing 
being real and being reality. If a man discover new properties 
in a thing, is it correct to say that he has discovered more 
reality? According to Herbart, it is hardly so. All that can 
be said is that he has learned to know reality in a new way. The 
reality is the thing itself, and not its properties ; which are called 
indeed real, but not reality.^ Thus perhaps even the vulgar use 
and wont of speech, pressed into the service of philosophic argu- 
ment, might have exposed the " error " of Spinoza, that how 
many attributes a thing has, so much has it of reality.^ Only in 
appearance, thinks Herbart, do attributes measure reality. The 
so-called " real " movement of a ship, the " real " difference of 
paper and flax, and the " real " identity of both, for Herbart 
belong alike in the last analysis to the world of mere phenomena. 

Therefore for Herbart true reality has nothing in common 
with these ostensibly real happenings. The reality that is the 
ground and source of all phenomena must be sought outside of 
the phenomena themselves. It must exclude change, which as 
the specious concurrence of irreducible atoms cannot have meta- 
physical reality. It is true that this conclusion was favoured and 
probably suggested by an atomic theory of chemistry that is not 
so well accredited at the present day. 

But perhaps, if change be not real, there is nothing real. 
" Therefore we will utter the dictum ; Nothing is ! There is no 
reality."* Yet not for long is this scepticism conceivable; it 
barely flits across the path of the Herbartian dialectic and reap- 
pears no more. " Let a man plunge into nothingness as he will, 
the course of the world goes steadily on. Now a man may very 
easily find the way from the world to nothing, but then he finds 

'«. «. wirkUch. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 196. 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 197. 
*Ibid. Par. 199. 



58 Herbart and Froebel. 

the path of return closed to him. He cannot return again from 
nothingness to the world! Of every thing, of every event it 
may be said, you are nothing, and you do nothing. But things 
go on appearing; and involve us in the question, whence then 
can the appearance come? For it is clear that if nothing is, 
then nothing must appear."^ 

So there is something real, and yet it is not appearance. " We 
have now the given, as the actual appearance, whether it be of 
things, or conditions, or movements, as opposed to the real. 
which lies at its foundation. "^ All that is so far ascertained 
of this real is that it is positive. An effectual appearance can- 
not be explained by a negative reality. " The quality of the real 
is entirely positive or affirmative, without admixture of nega- 
tion."^ Also the real must be einfach, simple. For suppose it to 
be manifold, and to contain two determinations, A and B. Then 
these cannot by our hypothesis be reducible to a unity, or else 
this unity, and not A and B, would be the true quality of the 
real. But then, A and B would each without the other be insuffi- 
cient to constitute the real; they would be merely relative, and 
reality would lose its absolute, positive character. Reality is 
then positive and simple. Unto these conclusions Herbart would 
add two others. " The quality of the real is absolutely inacces- 
sible to all ideas of quantity," for a manifold real would con- 
tradict simplicity. " How much, or how many, is, remains quite 
undetermined by the idea of the real."* In other words, though 
each real be necessarily simple, there may be many reals. The 
distinction is between manifold in reality and manifold of reality, 
of which the former only is forbidden, and the latter admissible. 

Having now arrived at a more definite notion of reality, as 
something made up of positive and simple reals, Herbart turns 
to the venerable problem of inherence. For him the common 
sense theory of reality as somewhat in which different attributes 
inhere is quite contradictory. Indeed the phenomenon of inher- 
ence is the indication of a plurality of reals. For suppose that 
a thing, A, have several attributes, a, h, c, etc. Then, according 
to the common sense view, A is their seat and substance, and is 
a real. But if a real, A is simple, and so must be equal to a, b, c, 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 190. 

^Ibid. Par. 300. 

^Ibid. Par. 206. 

*Allg*mtint Metaphysik. Par. ao8. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 59 

etc., separately, rather than to a+b+c+^^c, which would make A 
a complex. We have now this contradictory result, that A, 
which is absolute, is equal to a, to b, to c, etc., which are merely 
inherent in it. This is surely a contradiction, unless it be that 
a, b, c, etc., are as it were contingent aspects of A, just as the 
square root of 64, or 2 raised to the third power, are contingent 
aspects of 8. But this is evidently not the case. The only solu- 
tion of the difficulty is to posit several As. It does not neces- 
sarily follow that any one of these will be equal to a, or b, or c. 
All that can be said is that the attributes a, b, c, etc., arise out 
of the combination of several As ; or in other words, that sub- 
stance is the index or witness of a plurality of reals.^ 

And now the dilemma of inherence is circumvented. Sub- 
stance is for Herbart " not a thing with many attributes, and it 
alone does not lie at the root of these attributes, but a manifold 
of reals must be postulated for every one of them."^ For 
the attribute a may be understood the combination of reals 
A'+A'+A'-H^/c, for the attribute b, A"+K"+K"+etc., and so 
on, where the sign + is used to indicate mere connexion and 
not addition. It remains to account for the unity of attributes 
in one substance. This difficulty Herbart meets by the hypothesis 
of the identity of the first real in each combination. " It is 
understood of itself that the first term in all these series must 
be the same; and that the series should radiate as it were from 
the one center."' In conclusion, what now is the thing of com- 
mon sense? For Herbart it is not a sum or a system of attri- 
butes, as idealism tends to insist, but it hcLs these attributes, only 
that which has these attributes is not the indivisible substance 
of a Spinozist metaphysic but the connection of a plurality of 
reals. 

It follows from Herbart's ontology that there is no real change. 
Education is not real, character is not real, Hfe itself is not real 
if one has the will to believe Herbart. The horror of these 
thoughts is mitigated by the recollection that for Herbart the 
real is not the valuable. For him the real has no value; life, 
education, character, the highest. 

The common sense view of change is that a substance varies 
its attributes. A, that was once a, b, c, etc., is now a, b, d, etc. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 215. 

^Ibid. Par. 218. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 218. 



6o Herbart and Froebel. 

On reflection this proves unthinkable. According to Herbart, 
the real situation is that a arises out of the connexion of reals 
A'+A'+A'+^/c, b from the connection A"+A"+A"+rfc., c 
from the connection A"'+A"'+A"'+ etc., and d from the con- 
nexion A""+A""+A""+^^r. Then the apparent change of A, 
from a, b, c, etc., to a, b, d, etc., really means that A has no 
longer its original connexion with the series A"'+A"'+A"'+^^<:., 
but has entered into a connexion with the series A""-f-A""+A""4- 
etc. Reality is the same as before. 

But the question now arises, what is the nature of this mys- 
terious connexion^ of the reals? In other words, now that being 
has been explained, how is it possible to explain happening? It 
was from happenings, from experiential phenomena, that Her- 
bart took his departure, and it is these which he is vitally con- 
cerned to explain. What can happen to the qualities of simple 
reality, or what can happen beyond them? Or how does that 
which happens in connexion with them lend itself to an interpre- 
tation of experience? The answer to this question is the key 
to Herbart's epistemology and his psychology. 

Whatever happens when the reals come into connexion must 
be regarded as ultimate causation. Now let two reals A and B 
be represented by contingent aspects, as A by a-|-/3 + y and B by 
m+n—y. When A and B come into connexion, there will then 
be left only a + )8 + m + w as perceptible contingent aspects of 
A and B. The reals are unchanged ; but their contingent aspects 
are alterable. " But then nothing happens ! Everything stays 
just as it is ! How can anything happen, when the real merely 
remains like itself ? "^ The only outlet is in the condition of the 
apparent happenings. In the illustration, the reals A and B may 
be regarded as differing in the quality of their contingent aspects 
to the extent y, so that on coming into connexion they tend to 
disturb one another to this extent y. But A and B as unchange- 
able reals must preserve themselves against the tendency to a 
disturbance. A has still to be equal to a+^S + y and B to 
m-{-n~y, in order that apparently A+B may be equal to 
a-l-jS+m + n. Thus A and B have preserved themselves to the 
extent y. 



^Zusammensein. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 235. Lotze {Metaphysics, Book I. Chapter II.) repeats 
this question and rejects the solution which Herbart has to offer. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 6i 

It is now possible to summarise the argument of Herbart con- 
cerning change. It is the resultant of the contact of two or more 
reals which differ in the quality of their contingent aspects. 
Acts of self-preservation are performed by the reals to the extent 
of their difference in quality, and out of these self-preservations 
as manifested in the alteration of contingent aspects is generated 
the appearance of change. 

And now, how does man stand in relation to phenomena 
and to reality? Herbart is ready with the following answer: 
" Granted that a spectator should stand at such a point that he 
should not know the simple quality, but should be himself 
involved in the different relations of A to B, C, D, and so forth ; 
then all that remains visible to him is the peculiarity of the indi- 
vidual self-preservations, not the constant similarity of their 
origin and their resuh. This is the standpoint of Man.^ So 
Herbart comes to regard feelings as the self-preservations of the 
soul, which is ignorant at once of its own nature, and of the 
fact that its experiences, all-important as they are to itself, depend 
upon happenings in connection with reals outside of it, of whose 
own self-preservations it can know nothing. 

3. The Cosmology of Herbart. In the Synechology or Cos- 
mology Herbart reverses the analytic procedure by which in the 
Ontology he has arrived at the fundamental doctrines of his 
realism. Arduous is now the task before him, no less than 
to reconstruct from his reals, and from the theory of their 
self-preservations, the world of human experience. Few will 
maintain that Herbart has succeeded here. In order to 
explain the appearance of matter he introduced what he re- 
garded as a fictitious category, that of a continuum, or of 
partially overlapping points, precisely as the mathematician 
employs so imaginary a quantity as v^ZIl. The use which 
Herbart makes of this methodological device is ingenious. 
For although in the case of two reals A and B the reals 
must disturb one another to the extent of their difference 
in quality, yet, do we suppose three or more reals in con- 
nexion, we are obliged to conceive a preservation that 
appears no more than partial. In reality the preservation 
must be complete, because the reals are unalterable, but it 
will appear to be incomplete. For B as against A and A' 

^Allgemeine Metapkysik. Konigsberg, i8j8. Par. 336. 



62 Herbart and Froebel. 

must appear to preserve itself only in part or else to have 
a doubled self-preservation which is inconsistent with our 
hypothesis. The rest is easy. Out of a tendency to complete 
the self-preservation will arise the notion of attraction. Re- 
pulsion will arise from a tendency to hinder the complete- 
ness of the self-preservation.^ Several As and Bs, armed 
with their specious attractions and repulsions, form aggre- 
gates that convey the idea of a corporeal mass. So matter 
has been reconstructed from the reals, if possibly with a 
certain disregard for concreteness. 

Like matter, time and motion may be explained by the 
fiction of a continuum, in which the reals appear to lie, 
although they do not. Changes in motion are not real, and 
yet they are the objective appearance of the contacts of 
reals; and, further, to the human observer they appear as 
in time, and even, because they partly overlap, as in con- 
tinuous time. Thus, although to the real in itself the cate- 
gories of space and motion do not apply ; yet for the observer, 
the real is to be regarded as at rest in its own space, but 
moving in the spaces of other reals.- The real is timeless, 
yet out of its meetings with other reals there arises the 
notion of time. The real is immaterial, yet out of these 
meetings there comes also the notion of matter. 

In all this argument the objection perhaps holds, that the 
more ingenious, the more elaborate, the more mathematical 
it is, the more does it commend itself alike to our admira- 
tion and our unbelief. At least this tends to be true of 
persons of the concrete type of mind, whose feelings and 
will rebel against the abstractions of its intellectualism. 

4. The epistemology of Herbart. That part of his meta- 
physic which Herbart calls the Eidolology deals with the 
epistemological problem of how man may be able to act 
as a spectator of the objective semblance of the interaction 
of reals. Its problem then is the problem of the self, and 
covers the determination of the origin and possibility of 
ideas, the process of knowledge, and the general founda- 
tions of psychology. 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 270. 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 283. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 63 

In general, idealistic solutions of the problem of the self 
have rested upon the assumption of an identity between the 
self as knower and the self as known; in more technical 
terms, of the subjective and objective Ego. As Spinoza 
expresses it, if any man know anything, then he also knows 
that he knows it, and he knows again his knowledge of 
the knowledge and so on to infinity. Yet between the self 
as knower and as known, though there may possibly not be 
a difference, there is clearly a valid distinction. For Herbart 
the distinction is absolute. " If the known be a certain A, 
then the knowledge of A is not A itself; and the sum, A 
plus the knowledge of A, is no Ego."^ 

What solution is offered by Herbart for the problem of 
the Ego? Whatever it be, it must affect his educational 
theory. For Herbart in the first place the Ego, being a 
subject and real, as such remains unknown like other reals. 
This however is only true of the metaphysical soul. The 
empirical Ego, or the Ego as object, is to be regarded as a 
complex of attributes, and so falls under the category of 
inherence which Herbart has been at pains to analyse. Not 
the real Ego therefore, but the Ego as known, is a resultant 
of forces taking their rise in the self-preservations of reals. 
The investigation of these forces is the task of psychology. 
" The soul is not originally a power of reflection, an impulse 
and the like. Neither is it constructed out of real and ideal 
activity, as Fichte would have it. Rather must its whole 
spiritual diversity be supposed to consist in an adequate 
number of determinations of a manifold connexion with 
other and again other reals. "- 

But if man cannot know reality itself, and if thus the 
real soul be past his ken, he has the consolation of knowing 
actual happenings. His sensations, the material of all his 
knowledge, are themselves the preservations of his soul 
against other reals. Sensations, as the resultants of the meet- 
ings of reals, compel him to posit these reals. 

5. Certain implications for education. Upon the metaphysic 
depends the psychology of Herbart, and upon the psychology, 
the education. But it is seldom remarked that the theory 

^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 323. 
^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 364. 



64 Herbart and Froehel. 

of education of Herbart is dependent upon a metaphysic. 
One would imagine that its utmost genesis were in psychol- 
ogy as such. And yet on maturer consideration it may be 
doubted to what extent psychology, as descriptive and ex- 
perimental, may alone and unaided give even a tentative 
answer to any fundamental educational problem. In the case 
of the educational theory of Herbart, at least three of its 
major principles seem to merely filter through a psychological 
medium in the course of their derivation from a rarer meta- 
physical source. For methodological reasons these principles 
may be stated in negative form. They are, that education 
is not real, that education is not free, and that it does not 
proceed by an organic or evolutionary unfolding of the human 
spirit. This bald and negative formulation, though in itself 
it may do Herbart less than justice, may temporarily sub- 
serve the antithetical method because of its almost absolute 
contrast with the foregoing analysis of the educational theory 
of Froebel. 

For Herbart education is not real. Reality is unchange- 
able, and the educator can only manipulate the iridescent 
colors on its surface. It is true that for Herbart worths are 
constituted by these colors and not by reality, as the worth 
of a diamond may be said to reside in its fires. Yet some 
will think it degrading that education should be mere appear- 
ance. It is not a satisfactory hypothesis for the educator that 
the essence of things is not amenable to moral predication, 
and can never be a whit the better or worse for all his efforts. 

And again, for Herbart ideas arise out of an interaction 
of reals over which the self has no power. Freedom exists 
as an externally produced harmony, but it is admitted that 
such freedom is only a specious pretence of moral autonomy, 
and is not real. It is not even in process of becoming trans- 
cendental. 

Finally, for Herbart education is strictly not a development. 
According to the fundamentals of his metaphysic it should 
be an aggregation of ideas, due to undirigible self-preserva- 
tions of reals. It is true that in the psychology Herbart 
gets far away from so untenable a position, that he introduces 
fusions and blendings of ideas, and subjects these processes 
to a mathematical regime. But ever at the root of these 



Philosophy of Herbart. 65 

changes there lurks the atomism of the metaphysic. It seems 
to be a fundamental and consistent assumption of the mathe- 
matical psychology of Herbart that the ideational units 
remain true throughout every fusion to their isolation, inde- 
pendence, and mutual externality. 

But although he may sympathise with the Herbartian 
psychology, no modern educator will subscribe to the meta- 
physic of Herbart. For the crucial transition from a set 
of originally unrelated reals to a phenomenal world of rela- 
tions is too severely unintelligible to win permanent adher- 
ence even from sympathetic minds.^ If indeed it were really 
thinkable that all relations may be external to their terms, 
then surely it should follow that relations are pure illusion.* 
But in the assumption of self-preserving activities among the 
reals Herbart has smuggled into his system as it were a core 
of idealism ; and while it is true that his psychology and 
educational theory have never lost the impression of their 
pluralistic origin, it is conceivable that this core of idealism 
may be sponsor to some part of their validity. 

III. 

I. The so-called faculties. It is now possible to turn to 
the psychology of Herbart. In the judgment of Beneke, the 
two chief advances of modern psychology were made respec- 
tively by Locke and Herbart, in that the former dealt a mortal 
blow to the theory of innate ideas, and the latter to the 
theory of innate faculties. Herbart found that the so-called 
faculties are no more than classifications of mental phenomena. 
To make them prior to such phenomena is to lapse into 
the fallacy of the physician who argues that a certain draught 
produces sleep because it is possessed of a soporific faculty. 
Even as classifications, the faculties seemed to Herbart to 
be unreliable in the absence of the needful empirical data of 
psychology, although in so far as present conditions are con- 
cerned, it would seem that the validity of this objection to 
the faculties has been diminished in proportion to the suc- 
cessful activity of the recent period of psychological research. 

^Cf. Lotze, Metaphysics. Book I. Chapter I. 

^Cf. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics. London, 1903. p. 148. 



66 Herbart and Froebel. 

But a " faculty " psychology offers yet another difficulty. Its 
basis is in introspection, and introspection alters its own 
object. " Self-observation mutilates the facts of consciousness 
in the very act of seizing them."^ Upon these three grounds, 
then, Herbart would reject the psychology of the faculties. 
First, it offers an explanation which is no explanation; sec- 
ond, its forms are ill grounded in empirical fact; and third, 
of its own nature it deceives itself. 

Only one classification suggestive of the faculties retains 
the respect of Herbart. Usage compels him to adopt the 
terminology of conception, feeling and desire. Even these 
are unscientific terms, and to add to them other supposititious 
faculties, and to erect upon these a weighty superstructure, 
is to build an aerial castle on a mythology of the mind. 

As the destroyer of causal faculties Herbart reaches 
psychological greatness. But he may have harried them 
beyond necessity. Though there be no original cut-and-dried 
faculties, there may be original mental tendencies. Such 
tendencies, though they may do violence to the Herbartian 
metaphysic, are indicated by the a priori mental categories 
of Kant and the mental predispositions of heredity. Here in 
a sense is visible the fundamental psychological antithesis 
in Herbart and Froebel. For Herbart the mind is ideational 
content; for Froebel it has from the outset a unity of form. 
Only perhaps from an evolutionary point of view may the 
unity and polarity of the mind be duly co-ordinated and 
synthesised. 

2. Ideas as dynamic. If there be no principles of unity in 
the mind, no faculties, no forms, and no original tendencies 
to faculties, principles or forms, then the mind must be some 
sort of aggregate of isolated ideational forces. For Herbart, 
ideas are atomic forces, which are false to their atomism 
only to the extent of fusions and blendings that mask their 
plurality without reducing it. In chemistry one is familiar 
with the notion of irreducible and disparate elements behind 
every compound. In like way Herbart, with the whole school 
of associationists, seems to assume that the most complex 
thought may be resolved in the limit into a plurality of un- 
related ideas. For Herbart in particular these ideas are con- 

^Lehrhuch zur Psychologie. Konigsberg, 1834. Par. 3. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 67 

stant enough, independent enough, self-identical enough to 
be amenable to mathematical treatment. But although it 
may be needless to follow him into a statics and dynamics^ 
of the mind that are based upon a vague analogy of mental 
tensions to physical forces, yet it may not be wasteful, and 
it may not be superfluous, to refer merely to the central thought 
of Herbart in this theory, the thought of ideas as dynamic. 

For Herbart concepts become forces when they resist one 
another. They are independent of original mental unities. 
The mind itself is a series of masses of them, each mass 
rising or falling from the threshold of consciousness accord- 
ing to its groupings and consequent trains of association. 
It is true that in the most recent psychology the association 
of ideas is a less prominent category than stimulus and re- 
action. But the category of association, and the theory of 
ideas as independent forces upon which it is built, retains a 
limited validity. For a moment, then, one may take the 
point of view of Herbart. What happens when concepts 
resist one another? Experience finds that they are not 
destroyed, nor left unchanged ; they are subject to change, 
but not annihilation. " The real concept is changed into an 
effort to present itself."^ Therefore only remove hindrances, 
and concepts will tend to reproduce themselves. Here is 
evidently the principle of involuntary memory. For Herbart 
the metaphor of tensions between concepts is a pretext for 
a statics and dynamics of the mind to treat respectively of 
equilibrated and disturbing concept-forces. On the aptness 
of this metaphor depends much of the validity of the educational 
system of Herbart. 

Let us attempt to subject the metaphorical theory of 
Herbart to an empirical verification. The mind is to be a 
product of independent forces called ideas. Now the phe- 
nomena of experience which seem to corroborate this view 
include especially dreams, reverie, the facts of abnormal 
psychology, habit and the feeling of inhibition in attention. 

In dreams, when the reference to ends in which the unity 
of consciousness perhaps consists is laid aside, it would 
seem that the mind is resolved into a chaos of irresponsible 

^Lehrbuch zur Psychologic. Konigsberg, 1834. Par. 13. 
^Lehrbuch zur Psychologie. Par. 11. 



68 Herhart and Froebel. 

notions which rise and fall and make combinations by virtue 
of the arbitrary independence of each. And if there be a 
continuity in dreams, it is at best fantastic. It appears to 
be purely associative, and subject to no guiding process of 
discrimination. Yet it remains not only true that the inde- 
pendence of ideas in dreams is apt to be relative, and to this 
extent conditioned by some unity of purpose, however fan- 
ciful it may be ; but it also remains true that the large amount 
of independence which ideas may be said to possess is essen- 
tially of a secondary and derivative character. The ideas 
ol the dream consciousness, like those of habit, appear to 
have originated out of the stress and strain of a mental re- 
action upon specific stimuli. In that case the interaction 
of independent ideas is inadequate as a category for the 
explanation of dreams. The basis of association appears to 
be less one of subjective cohesion than objective teleological 
reference. 

As in dreams, so in reverie, the mind seems to function 
sometimes more by compartments than as a whole. The 
mind as will seems dormant, while concepts mass themselves 
as best the}'^ may. Yet reverie may hardly be more than 
a recapitulation and reorganisation of genuine teleological 
thought. Therefore ultimately it would appear to make less 
for an atomism of ideational forces than a purposeful mental 
unity. 

Most of all in hypnotic suggestion, and more generally in 
the facts of abnormal psychology, is there evidence for sup- 
posing the soul to be at the mercy of its states. Such evi- 
dence seems indisputable so far as it goes. But again, 
it would appear that the phenomena of suggestion in hyp- 
notism only point in a secondary way to an atomism of ideas. 
Primarily they are only made possible through a previous 
unitary experience belonging to the hypnotic subject. To 
illustrate, the hypnotic subject who is told to raise a finger 
can do so only because he knows what a finger is and how 
to raise it. The polarisation of his ideas is then made pos- 
sible by their previous organic relation, and hardly points 
to the original independence of conceptual forces. As in 
dreams, and reverie, and abnormal psychology, so in 
habit also is there evidence of the independence of ideas 



Philosophy of Herhart. 6g 

in relation to the unity of the normal mental process. It 
is probably fair to say that the Herbartian psychology is 
before all things a psychology of habit. For it is in habit 
that ideas become fixed in their associations, and it is in 
habit that they appear to be most independent in their activi- 
ties. It is true that there is something incongruous about 
the notion of an association of atoms. On the other hand, 
however incongruous it may be, it is not only fundamental 
to the Herbartian metaphysic, but it not unsuccessfully in- 
terprets the facts of psychology in so far as these are chosen 
from the realm of habit alone. If consciousness were no 
more than habit the psychology of Herbart might be an 
acceptable account of its phenomena. 

But habit is only the static side of consciousness, the 
primary nature of which is dynamic. Genetically and biolog- 
ically, the office of consciousness would appear to be the 
performance of imperative readjustments. Perhaps the early 
development of the human consciousness may have been cor- 
relative with the need of an increased wariness against ani- 
mals stronger than man, or with the necessity for an increased 
wisdom in the search for food. In any case, consciousness 
would be genetically and primarily not a number of clear 
ideas, but a subjective response and awakening to the stress 
and strain of critical situations. It is out of conflict and 
confusion, and often out of haziness and vagueness that 
ideas arise. Apparently the clearness and immediacy of 
ideas in habit, illustrated by the almost reflex obedience of 
a trained soldier to the command " attention " or " halt " 
even though he be off duty, may be explained by the cumu- 
lative efifect of a recurrence of approximately the same solu- 
tions to approximately the same problems in experience. It 
is then out of the problematic situation that ideas arise. 
But the problematic situation or crisis is a case where the 
combined energies of the self are brought into requisition 
for a single end. In other words, in the ultimate limit the 
being of ideas is evidence of a unitary, teleological, mental 
process. 

Concepts however may be forces, without being inde- 
pendent forces. The phenomenon of inhibition in attention 



70 Herhart and Froehel. 

seems to point to an inner striving, and an inner striving 
should imply something to strive against. Ideas are at war 
among themselves apparently in the spirit of the Herbartian 
psychology. And yet it is conceivable that the strife of ideas 
may be within and for a purposive self. Though the ideas 
be a divided and rebellious section of the self, yet they seem 
to be affiliated to the self in a sort of constitutionally indis- 
soluble union. 

3. Reason and will. In the psychology of Herbart, the 
emphasis is on apperceived content and not apperceiving 
activity. More simply, it is upon ideas and not will. Even 
desires are regarded as the appetitive tendencies of concepts 
and conceptual masses. And the will, the apperceiving activ- 
ity which plays so large a part in the psychological theory 
of Wundt, is for Herbart only a kind of desire. " The faculty 
of desire, together with those of representation and feeling, 
should furnish an exhaustive classification of the mental 
faculties."^ For Herbart the will is that kind of desire with 
which is coupled the idea of the attainment of its object. 
But it is possible to discriminate the will differently, as the 
whole personality consciously functioning in a situation, and 
for such an activity desire is an unconvincing name. 

For Herbart the will is not free. It is not dependent upon 
the formal or categorical reason. " Reason is originally 
neither commanding nor law-giving; above all, it is not the 
source of willing. It is quite as little a source of knowledge. 
Nevertheless it is regarded as such ; indeed it is thought to 
be the highest judge and authority, which is a very natural 
result."^ But the reference of Herbart is to the forms of 
thought and not to mental content or ideas. According to 
the psychology of the tension of concept masses, the will 
cannot fail to be dependent upon presentations, concepts, 
ideas, if not upon reason formally as such. The will is not 
primary, not original. In Herbartian education it will not 
be evolved by constructive occupation and practical endeavour 
so much as erected by the intellectual reinforcement of satis- 
factory groups of concepts. Character will be constructed 
from without, to the disregard of those developmental forces 

^Lehrbuch zur Psychologic. Konigsberg, 1834. Par. 107. 
^Ibid. Par. 115. 



Philosophy of Herbart. yi 

of spiritual evolution upon the cooperation of which Froebel 
for his part did not fear to rely. 

Little is said in this chapter of apperception and interest. 
It is true that these shibboleths in a way summarise the 
permanent contributions of Herbart to psychology, but for 
this very reason it seems unnecessary to afford them a pre- 
liminary analysis, so well-known are their chief implications. 
Interest and apperception will presently receive a compara- 
tive and synthetic treatment. 

4. Another interpretation of the psychology of Herbart. A 
revolutionary interpretation of the psychology of Herbart 
has been recently advanced by Dr. Davidson of Edinburgh 
University.^ The psychology of Herbart, we are told, is 
founded on the metaphysic of Leibnitz, and its implications 
are those of the " functional " psychology of Professor Adam- 
son and Professor James.^ 

It is customary to regard the psychology of Herbart as 
obsolete in other fields than that of education. In education 
it is charged with the validity and invested with the authority 
of an empirical law. It is found to work fairly well, though 
to what extent its practical value may have been overrated 
or underrated by certain common sense departures of teachers 
from its implications, or possibly by the rebellious workings 
of the minds of pupils according to unorthodox mental laws, 
is a question not easy to decide. Still, the pragmatically 
minded will sympathise with the following argument of Dr. 
Davidson. " If the Herbartian theory of education ' works,' 
then this very fact implies that the practice of Herbartian 
education involves a psychological theory which must be 
true." The Herbartian psychology really seems to work too 
well not to have a quantum of validity. But our thesis as 
against Dr. Davidson is, that it is only valid for habit, and 
for mental phenomena allied to habit, that it gives no satis- 
factory account of attention, and that therefore it falls short 
of the relative completeness of a modern functional 
psychology. Incidentally, let it be remarked that there is a 
danger in deducing the psychology of Herbart from the phil- 
osophy of Leibnitz. Herbart not only knew Leibnitz but 

M Tiew Interpretation of Herbart's Psychology and Educational Theory. Edinburgh 'and 
London. 1906. 
^Ibid., p. 41. 



^2 Herbart and Froebel. 

criticised him ;^ and assuredly his own metaphysic, the obvious 
and acknowledged source of his psychology, is far from the 
mere result of a late recrudescence of the Leibnitzian school. 
There is also a danger of confusing interpretation with jus- 
tification. A metaphysic may interpret, but experience alone 
justifies. 

It is difficult to believe that either Leibnitz or Herbart had 
a psychology essentially functional. In Leibnitz the logical 
tendency is to a subjective idealism. For him reality is 
reducible to monads, simple, self-active, spiritual, independent 
beings, each a mirror of the universe, but each except God 
an imperfect mirror, each unfolding from within, and having 
no windows, and only controlled by a pre-established har- 
mony. Matter is for Leibnitz the confused perception by 
a monad of other monads. And, although the perceptions 
of the monads differ in quality, the monads enter into no 
relations, but the world appears by the unfolding of the 
monad itself. It is difficult to make more out of this than 
a subjective idealism. 

" When Professor James sums up by saying that * the 
knowing of many things together is just as well accounted 
for when we call it a functioning of the soul state as when 
we call it a reaction of the soul,' he is only expressing in 
positive terms what we have tried to show is implicit in 
Herbart's theory of the reaction of soul."- Let us examine 
this as a crucial passage. First of all, what is the gist of 
the quoted corroboration from Professor James? It is that 
for certain definite psychological purposes the substantial 
unity of the soul is superfluous. " Herbart, as we have tried 
to show, considered it superfluous ; and any theory of educa- 
tion that bases on such a principle is not entitled to rank 
as scientific."* In limitation of the validity of this argument 
at least four considerations may be taken into account. The 
nature of the soul is rather a metaphysical than a psycholog- 
ical question, and the soul may be as metaphysically 
necessary as perhaps it is psychologically irrelevant. 
The abstract science of psychology merely as such adopts 

>Cf. Chapter II. 2. 

'Davidson, A new Interpretation, etc., p. 64. 

^Ikid. p. 66. 



Philosophy of Herbart. 73 

an attitude of thorough-going duaHsm^ which is ultimately 
almost unthinkable. In any case, the word substantial almost 
begs the question of a soul unity, for all real unity is prob- 
ably purposive rather than substantial, as the pragmatic 
philosophy- of Professor James virtually asserts. Finally, 
Herbart himself did believe in a real metaphysical soul. This 
alone would suffice to end the matter, were it not true that 
the real soul of the Herbartian metaphysic is a barren ab- 
straction unrelated to the mind as known, and not an in- 
telligible principle of unification. 

Our general conclusion is that the psychology of Her- 
bart is not equivalent to a psychology of function, if only 
because the latter theory will have none of the traditional 
Locke-Humian permanence and independence of ideas. For 
this very reason Professor James has criticised Herbart as 
one of the victims of the " psychologist's fallacy." " The 
thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded as the 
identity of its recurrent thought ; and the perceptions of 
muliplicity, of co-existence, of succession, are severally con- 
ceived to be brought about only through a multiplicity, a 
co-existence, a succession, of perceptions. The continuous 
flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its place an 
atomism, a brick-bat plan of construction, is preached, for 
the existence of which no good introspective grounds can be 
brought forward, and out of which presently grow all sorts 
of paradoxes and contradictions, the heritage of woe of stu- 
dents of the mind. These words are meant to impeach the 
entire English psychology derived from Locke and Hume, 
and the entire German psychology derived from Herbart, 
so far as they both treat ' ideas ' as separate subjective en- 
tities that come and go."^ 

In something like a functional psychology there is shadowed 
a certain synthesis of Herbart and Froebel, in that there 
is room both for the emphasis of Herbart upon mental con- 
tent and habit, and for the emphasis of Froebel upon will 
and progress. According to a psychology of function, habit 
and attention work into and out of one another as severally 
the retrospective and prospective sides of a dynamic process 

'Cf. James, Psychology. New York, i8qo. I. pp. 21S-220. 
^Psychology, 1890. I. p. 196. See also I. pp. 3S3-3S4- 



74 Herbart and Froebel. 

in which the organism readjusts itself to imperative crises. 
But it is not to be imagined that such a concrete psychology 
is the only or the fundamental ground of a synthesis of the 
educational theories of Herbart and Froebel. It is pur- 
posed to indicate other such grounds, here novel and there 
familiar enough, in the hope that here and there they may 
support the educator more safely, more stably, and even on 
a higher level of interpretation than the more subjective 
opinions of individual reformers, however great. 



CHAPTER III. 
The Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 

The attempt has been made to analyse firstly the philosophy 
of Froebel, and secondly the philosophy of Herbart. It may 
now be possible to adopt a more synthetic standpoint, from 
which an estimate may be made of the relative validity of 
the theories of Herbart and Froebel. Accordingly the earlier 
part of the present chapter is devoted to an attempt at a 
psychological synthesis; and the latter part to an indication 
of the possibility of an ethical and metaphysical synthesis. 

I. 

I. The soul and the concept. It has been admitted that 
associationism may be one terminus of a valid psychology. 
In dreams, in habit, in reverie, and in the phenomena of 
abnormal psychology, ideas manifest a disconcerting self- 
sufficiency and independence. No doubt this independence, 
this self-sufficiency, are relative and in a sense derivative 
from a unitary activity of the soul. And yet derivative may 
be too strong a word ; for if there is no idea in vacuo, neither 
is there any soul known to experience without ideas. It 
would seem that the original activity of the soul may be 
conceived as a tendency at the same time to a spiritual unity 
and an ideational differentiation. If so, neither Herbart 
nor Froebel completely satisfies. Froebel thinks of the unity 
of the mind as something given, and in a sense from its 
origin fully mature; Herbart ascribes to the original soul 
no more power than an incomprehensible reaction to pre- 
serve itself, which changes its appearance without stirring 
the depth of its reality. For Herbart the unity of the mind 
is a product of apperceptive processes in which the forces 
are ideas. There would seem to be a sense in which the 
unity of the soul, the self or Ego if you will, is achieved 
rather than given ; and yet also a sense in which it is 
implicit as a tendency from the first. Thus the category 



76 Herhart and Froebel. 

of evolution offers a working psychological synthesis. The 
mind at birth may be regarded as the elementary germ both 
of a unified personality and differentiated ideas; and yet in 
such a way that the character and individuality of an adult 
are essentially things to be developed and achieved. 

While it is not pretended that such a synthesis is authori- 
tative, it has at least this value for a philosophy of education, 
that it suggests a reasonable theory of free will. Does the 
self function as a unity? Then it may be free. Is it swayed 
by independent wills called concepts? Then it is not free. 
For if mental activity be merely a phase of the tension of 
concepts, regarded as more or less independent, although 
capable of fusions and blendings, then the self is no more 
than a product of circumstances over which it has no control. 
Herbart is therefore a determinist, and education is for him 
wholly a matter of external stimuli to which mechanical 
responses are expected and assumed. But the logical corollary 
of the psychology of Froebel is transcendental freedom. Ideas 
are not taken seriously as independent activities; but the 
soul is looked upon as superior to any or all of them, and 
to any or all of the desires and actions that may be at the 
back of them. This dignified and happy view is not quite 
warranted by fact. The will appears to be not so transcen- 
dental but that it may be jeopardised, not so transcendental 
but that it may never be achieved. 

What light is thrown upon this antithesis by the recon- 
ciling category of human evolution? Essentially this, that 
freedom appears no more to be a static thing, given once 
for all, or once for all withheld. Freedom may be viewed 
as a potentiality becoming actualised. Man may not begin 
with transcendental freedom, but he moves toward it. He 
is not wholly superior to mundane circumstance, to time, 
place, and opportunity ; and yet he may more and more 
become so, not in the sense of dispensing with them, but 
in the sense of making them instrumental to his purposes. 
If he is in a sense at the mercy of his concepts, still, they 
are his concepts. It would seem to be a very practical and 
inspiring notion, that freedom lies in a process of becoming, 
in which man gradually emancipates himself from the deter- 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. yy 

minations of external agencies, not by disregarding such 
determinations, but by giving them a value, and controlling 
them in relation to that value. The self is not concerned 
to suppress the activities of ideas, but to relate and guide 
them. Again, according to this view the self is not one thing, 
and the ideas another thing; but the self is the purposeful 
unity of its ideas, and the ideas are dififerentiated attitudes 
of the self. What is desired, is therefore not merely, as the 
Froebelian psychology might suggest, the conquest of ideas 
by the soul, and not merely, as Herbartianism implies, the 
formation of concept masses that are likely to combine to 
good effect; rather it is on the side of the unity of the soul, 
a will capable of controlling habitual ideas, and on the side 
of mental content, ideas at once ready to be precipitated into 
action and amenable to the guidance of the concrete self. 
The Froebelian psychology with its stress upon unity tends 
to be formal, the Herbartian, with its stress upon content, 
tends to be mechanical ; and the truer psychology may be 
one in which form and content, soul activity and idea activity, 
come to be regarded as normal correlatives functioning to- 
gether. Then morality may be based on environment as 
to its origin, but on freedom as to its value and goal. 

2. Mental forms and mental content. The emphasis which 
Herbart seems to set upon permanence and mental equilibrium 
is connected with the fundamental, and, as it stands, insuper- 
able difficulty of passing over from the soul as an independent 
and unchangeable real, without parts or diversity, and lack- 
ing even the activity which Leibnitz had ascribed to it, to 
the active mind of human experience. Between these two 
conceptions there is a gap that Herbart would none too suc- 
cessfully fill by the assumption of real happenings to the 
extent of self-preservations of the reals against one another. 
If there be some real happening, then why hold the reals 
to be unchangeable at all? If reality change at all, even in 
respect of happening and not in respect of being, then it is 
perhaps as well to hold the changing phenomena of our 
experience to partake of the nature of reality, as to invent 
an hypothetical occurrence equally irreconcilable with a 
hypothesis of pure being without becoming. 



78 Herhart and Froehel. 

" The soul," says Herbart, " has no innate natural talents 
nor faculties whatever, either for the purpose of receiving 
or for the purpose of producing. It is, therefore, no tabula rasa 
in the sense that impressions foreign to itself may be made 
upon it; moreover, in the sense indicated by Leibnitz, it is 
not a substance which includes in itself original activity. It 
has originally neither concepts, nor feelings, nor desires. It 
knows nothing of itself, and nothing of other things ; also 
in it lie no forms of perception and thought, no laws of 
willing and action, and not even a remote predisposition to 
any of these."^ This is not the soul as known, only Her- 
bart's theory of the metaphysical soul. The significance for 
life and education of such an hypothesis appears to be that 
the soul as a unity, or as natural tendency, in general the 
formal soul, is negligible though existent; only the content 
of the soul is an object of knowledge and a source of 
morality. 

The Herbartian psychology becomes consistently a polemic 
in favor of content; hence its value, and hence its formless- 
ness. According to the synthetic psychology already indicated 
in this chapter, no mental content that is merely content is 
competent to create the forms of mental action, any more 
than such forms could of themselves realise a content. Froe- 
bel approaches the other extreme from Herbart, and makes 
given mental unities hew out a content for themselves after 
the fashion of their own inwardness. A less abstract view 
is that form and content are inseparable aspects of the mental 
process, to such a degree that the question of priority may 
have to be abandoned. 

If it be true that Froebel tended more nearly to such a 
synthetic view than did Herbart, it may be attributed to 
the fact that he virtually adopted a category of evolution — 
development from within — as Herbart did not. "All human 
investigation," wrote Herbart, " must recognise the funda- 
mental source of vital forces by referring them to that provi- 
dence according to whose designs they were originated. No 
metaphysic and no experience reaches further. Every theory 
as to the probable creation of higher organisms from those 
of a lower order, can be refuted." To this Froebel might 

^Lehrbuch zur Psychologic. Konigsberg, 1834. Par. 152. 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 79 

have in part agreed, but he would have insisted upon some 
kind of unity and development throughout nature. Herbart 
did not conceive, with evolutionary idealism, that life may 
be evolutionary and yet divine; that the development of a 
higher from a lower order does not degrade the former but 
ennobles the latter; that even the conceivable derivation of 
organisms from comparatively inorganic matter need only 
show that matter is spiritual and significant in a way not 
hitherto suspected ; and that things are to be adjudged less 
according to their origins than their worths, or ends, or satis- 
factions. It will now be apparent that the opposition of 
mental forms and mental content has resolved itself into the 
opposition of the soul and its ideas, and that the synthesis 
suggested is that of an evolutionary psychology, where the 
category of evolution is intended to carry genetic and biolog- 
ical interpretation up to the level of spirit, by orientating 
them to future possibilities. 

3. Habit and attention. The antithesis between the psychol- 
ogy of Herbart and that of Froebel is manifested anew as a 
relative stress upon habit and attention. When Herbart 
makes the claim that the Ego, even should it exist as tran- 
scendental, could as such have no value for education,^ he 
appears to have in mind that the function of education is 
to cultivate habits of thought and character. When the school 
of Froebel, or rather of Kant, proclaims the soul to be 
transcendental, what is implied for education is the suprem- 
acy of will over habit, since the self is to be hailed as 
superior to any or all of its desires. In the synthesis, it may 
be possible to admit that the Herbartian cult of ideas may 
be a valuable account of the operations of habit, at the same 
time that progress may demand a Froebelian art of exercising 
the will in selfactivity, where selfactivity means action coupled 
with or hinged upon attention and initiative. For the Froe- 
belian psychology of selfactivity seems to strengthen the 
psychology of Herbart just at its weakest point, which is 
that it expects too much from ideas when it seems to imply 
that they alone and in their intellectual nature will induce 
morality. Froebel seems to remember better than Herbart 
that good or bad is to be predicated of our thoughts not 

^Cf. e. g. Herbart. Pddagogische Schriften. hrsg. Sallwurk. I. p. 271. 



8o Herbart and Froebel. 

after the matter but the manner of them. And yet Herbart 
has psychology so far on his side, that each idea tends 
somehow to be realised in motor activity, undirected or 
misdirected though the tendency may be. There is even a 
sense in which all effort is directed towards the supremacy 
of some idea. If ideas had no relative objectivity, or, what 
means the same thing, if habit had no force, then there would 
be no check upon the momentary vagaries of the self, and 
no truth better than a doubtful structure reared upon 
momentary subjective impulses. In a synthetic psychology, 
in a psychology of function, there is place then for the 
emphases of Herbart and Froebel alike. The mind in atten- 
tion goes out to an object as with Froebel, and the resultant 
idea returns upon the mind as with Herbart.^ And again, 
what becomes of the opposition of attention and habit, if 
habit be funded attention, and attention be accommodatory 
habit? The opposition no longer appears to inhere in the 
facts, but only in the point of view. 

4. An evolutionary psychology. There are those whose func- 
tional psychology does not carry them the length of the 
category of evolution. These may accept a reconciliation of 
the psychology of Herbart with that of Froebel, so far as 
concerns the functioning of the habit and attention of an 
agent in a given situation. But those who would go further 
with mental evolution, and, without interpreting mind merely 
from a genetic standpoint, still find it an ever-developing 
factor in the experience of the child and the race, may take 
their point of departure with Mr. Bosanquet, from " a con- 
tinuous presentation, to be described either as feeling, or 
as others would say, as having the three aspects of feeling, 
conation and sensation (or cognition)."^ The original con- 
tinuous presentation is not to be viewed as mere form, a 
pure Ego; nor as content only, a mass of independent ideas. 
As it functions, form and ideas will develop together. The 
unity of the self may be regarded as original, but as capable 
of higher expression ; and ideas will be present as possibility, 
but their actualisation will be a gradual development. We 
are now as it were between Locke and James. For Locke, 

'Cf. A Synthesis of Herbart and Froebel. Welton. In Educational Review, Sept. igoo. 
^Psychology of the Moral Self. London, 1897. p. 23. 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 8i 

ideas may vary not at all ;^ for Professor James, no two ideas 
are ever the same.^ We are adopting a view of the mind 
quite reconcilable with the latter statement, as though its 
identity were a persistent ideal, or purposeful, unity in 
change. 

Such a view of identity seems necessary to an interpretation 
of the category of evolution. One is compelled to abandon 
a block unity, a mere sameness, for a unity of purposeful 
reference. But a unity of purpose and function is very real ; 
and perhaps in the last resort no other unity remains in- 
telligible. Therefore it is only with a certain reservation 
that one affirms with Herbart, " every individual is and 
remains a chameleon." It is only possible to dismiss every 
form of mental unity from one's psychology, if one be pre- 
pared to dismiss with it the entire range of human purposes 
and values. The conception of the unity of the mind as 
purpose may perhaps involve a truer notion of the so-called 
transcendental will. Thus the will may be regarded as 
transcending circumstance not absolutely or with a given 
finality, but to the extent that the purposeful unity of the 
mind may be capable of subjugating side issues like the 
minor and subsidiary sensuous purposes. Transcendentalism 
is from this point of view less an endowment or even a 
possession of the will than a potentiality which may be 
starved or stifled as well as developed. Thus considered, the 
will is competent to regulate any presentation, or any train 
of ideas, only to the extent that it is exercised in doing so. 
Freedom exists more or less in proportion to the effort to 
guide rather than eradicate habitual and critical activities and 
ideas. The fugitive and cloistered will, unexercised and un- 
breathed, that never sallies out to meet its adversary, and 
that Milton cannot praise,^ loses, or never wins, its "trans- 
cendental " efficacy. 

5. Mental structure and mental function. Viewed structur- 
ally, the mind appears to consist of ideas ; viewed functionally, 
it seems to act as a unitary will. Will and ideas are then 
terminal aspects of a single process; and, as a matter of 

^Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II. Chapter 27. 
^Psychology. NewIYork, 1890. I. p. 23s- 
^Areopagiiica. 

6 



82 Herbart and Froehel. 

methodology, there is little to be said against placing an 
emphasis upon either. Psychology perhaps has to choose 
between two modes of procedure. The one mode is static; 
the investigator analyses the mental " content " at a given 
time. By this method one attains a sort of science of mental 
anatomy, or one gets as it were a cross section of conscious- 
ness. The alternative method is dynamic; it emphasises 
processes, and seeks to retain a reference to concrete vital 
conditions which the static or anatomical procedure has 
rigidly and even deliberately excluded. It assumes that the 
" anatomical " procedure is as inadequate to explain the 
living mind as anatomy itself to explain the physiological 
organism. After all, anatomy has the artificiality of an 
abstraction, and its purpose is to subserve something more 
functional and concrete. In a sense then, over against an 
anatomical view of the mind, a figuratively physiological 
view may be given a certain kind of priority; or at the 
least, the notion of mind as a process, as a dynamic func- 
tional principle, is to be taken into account, even when a 
deliberate methodology pursues the static and cross-sectional 
treatment of mental content. It is indeed clear that process 
without content, or change without permanence, or func- 
tion without a structure that functions, is meaningless. Con- 
versely content without process appears to be a fictitious 
abstraction, and so permanence does without change, and 
a structure without function. In the case of the mind, while 
content, permanence and structure suggest habit as the mode, 
and ideas as the units of its life, it is equally true that 
the categories of process, change and function suggest atten- 
tion as mode, and character as unit. A view of the mind 
as essentially habit is the result of looking immediately at 
the structure of its content. It comes from a retrospective 
seeing, from looking at what is already there ; from admiring 
the organisation of consciousness, from the revelation of its 
miracles of harmony already achieved and its record of 
already established control. One of the results for psychology 
of this emphasis upon organisation and habit is that ideas 
come to be expected to discharge all needful functions by 
virtue of a peculiar process of mutual association. In this 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 83 

way the English associationists and Herbart accounted for 
the major part of the phenomena of conscious life. 

The psychology of Froebel, so far as it goes, has the con- 
trary emphasis. It is processive, dynamic, attentive, readjus- 
tive and readaptational. From its very origin the soul is 
active. " The newborn child, like a ripe kernel of seed-corn 
dropped from the mother plant, has life in itself."^ From 
the psychological standpoint, Froebel cares perhaps less for 
habit than will, and from the ethical standpoint, less for what 
has been achieved than what may yet be done. Froebel 
is ever preoccupied with processes, and with what alone make 
processes intelligible, purposes. 

It is not difficult to synthesise structure and function in 
theory, and to remark that they are mutually essential aspects 
of a life process. It is not difficult to add that habit and 
will react upon one another, and that what has been done 
becomes a datum for what there is to do. But it is not 
easy in practice to dynamically adjust the convenient post 
mortem investigation of the mind by Herbart to the attempt 
at a natural history of it which distinguishes Froebel. For 
the educator is asked to cease to think of an Herbartian 
psychology, or of a Froebelian psychology; and to think in 
their stead of an Herbartian contribution to psychology, or 
a Froebelian emphasis in it. 

To summarise, the Herbartian account of mental phe- 
nomena may be approximately valid for the past, for habit, 
and possibly for physiological psychology. This last is 
added because it is in the nervous system that habits are 
formed and perpetuated. On the other hand the Herbartian 
psychology suffers from its unduly structural emphasis; it 
is abstract, in so far as it ignores the functional, accommo- 
datory, and prospective view. It may be synthesised to 
advantage with what Hegel might have called its Other, its 
residual complement in psychological emphasis, that which 
insists with Froebel on a self-activity, or with Wundt on 
an apperception which partakes of the nature of an ultimate 
volitional function. Again, the Herbartian phase of psychol- 
ogy, as a psychology of the association of ideas and of habit, 

^Friedrich Froebel's KindergarUnwesen. hrsg. Seidel, 1883. p. 33. Or Pedagogics of 
the KindergarUtt, 1895, p. 23. 



84 Herbart and Froebel. 

may be connected with physiological psychology and may 
therefore be suggestive, not to say valid, for the explanation 
of the primitive growth of consciousness; while Froebel's 
psychology, emphasising the forward tendency to ends, may 
seem to subordinate origin to value. But a synthetic or a 
functional psychology looks at the process of origin growing 
into value. 

6. The self and the situation. What has been said of habits 
and attention, of origins and value, of stable and dynamic 
mental elements, and of the tensions of ideas and self-activity, 
implies a theory of the self and the situation. A theory 
like that of Herbart, which explains mental activity as a 
tension of concepts, appears to disregard the phenomenon 
of the consciousness of self, and to attribute an overweening 
influence to environment. Nay, it is rejoined, does your 
evolutionary interpretation of the mind complain of a stress 
on environment? What is evolution but the outcome of 
environment? Does the evolutionary pot call the associative 
kettle black? And yet the alleged inconsistency may not be 
real. Evolution seems to mean more than situations, for 
it is not easy to see how any amount of mere environment, 
lacking a principle of inner activity, could produce anything. 

So far as Froebel's educational system emphasises the self, 
and that of Herbart the situation, there is need of a synthesis. 
Modern psychology looks upon the agent and the situation 
as two sides of a process of experience. The self is a sort 
of focus of the situation, as the latter is in turn an objective 
manifestation of the agent self; and there is a sense in which 
each may be said to determine the other. Progress is the 
tale of a continuous struggle between their mutually deter- 
mining forces in which the self, as conscious spirit, gradually 
gains the upper hand. 

It needs to be added that the evolutionary psychology 
which has been suggested as a possible ground of synthesis 
may be interpreted from the side of idealism. Idealism inter- 
prets evolution, in the first place, as a process of possibility 
becoming realisation. The evolution is interpreted by its 
end, although it may not be necessary to conceive this end 
as perfect in the sense of static or finished. In the second 
place, idealism notices a modification in the methodology of 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 85 

evolution, Man tends to take over the control of his own 
evolution from the hands of his mother nature, without deny- 
ing the fundamental wisdom of her " precepts." And finally, 
idealism interprets evolution as grounded in the absolute, 
although this phrase may be taken to imply the common 
travail in all things of an universal spirit, rather than the 
transformation of the universe into an ingenious mechanical 
toy. 

II. 

In turning from the attempt at a psychological synthesis 
to the suggestion of a metaphysical and ethical synthesis, it 
will be convenient to make the transition through a dis- 
cussion of the problem of freedom. 

I. Freedom. If action be prior to thought, then ethics may 
possibly be prior to metaphysic . At least, one cannot go 
far in philosophy without adopting some attitude to the 
ethical problem of freedom. On the one hand, as with Froe- 
bel, freedom may be a divine endowment, and real ; on the 
other, a.s with Herbart, it may be an inner harmony of ideas, 
the creation of circumstance. But there even seems to exist 
a possibility of reconciling these apparently diverse positions. 
That is to say, the quantum of truth in each may be mani- 
fested in a theory which will explain the facts better than 
either. For instance, the will may be neither free nor deter- 
mined, but struggling out of determinism into freedom. 

Herbart cannot reconcile himself to the notion of a transcen- 
dental freedom. How then does he include morality? For 
morality seems to stand or fall with responsibility, as re- 
sponsibility stands or falls with the freedom of the will. 
Nay, seems to be the rejoinder of Herbart, although man is 
not free, he acts none the less under the consciousness of 
freedom. He therefore attributes to himself responsibility, 
as others attribute it to him and he to others. But responsi- 
bility stops with the actor, no matter what may be the ultimate 
causes or occasions of the will. " However, if it be found 
that the will had an earlier will as its source, the responsi- 
bility begins again anew. The depraved man, after he has 
become entirely bad, will be held to be completely responsible 
for his crimes, but these again may be laid as a burden 



86 Herbart and Froebel. 

upon his corrupter, and so on backward as long as some- 
where a will may be pointed out as the originator of those 
crimes."^ This view appears to have the validity of origin, 
but not of end. The will is not what it was, it is not its 
own past causes and occasions, rather perhaps it is what it 
is becoming. Herbart makes freedom an illusion, because 
he finds causality behind it; but it may be regarded as a 
reality, because it has power of transcendence before it. 

Herbart agrees that there exists a self-control, in the sense 
of capacity to repress our desires in the light of considera- 
tions of good, and that this may be properly called freedom. 
The stronger a man's self-control, the freer he is. '' But, 
whether such a strength can be increased ad infimtum, cannot 
be determined by existing cases, for these indicate only a 
limited power."- Yet, it may be answered, if freedom as 
self-control be capable of ever greater advances, then it 
may be supposed to imply a leaven of the transcendental, 
or a tendency to overcome the limits of circumstance and 
time. 

2. Progress and equilibrium. There would seem to be that 
in the temperament of the individual which affects the mode 
of his metaphysical thought. He may gravitate tawards 
notions of rest, being, and permanence; or again to becom- 
ing, progress and change. It would seem that a metaphysic 
of unchangeable being marches with a notion of mental 
equilibrium, and a metaphysic of becoming with the idea of 
mental progress and evolution. Herbartianism tends on the 
whole to the notion of mental equilibrium as the end. Many- 
sided interest means equilibration. Indeed, many-sided in- 
terest includes also an element of progress; but there is a 
difference between its equable expansiveness and the passion- 
ate self-activity of idealism. This difference is perhaps largely 
of emphasis. An idealist will admit the need of mental bal- 
ance, but will set greater store upon mental activity and the 
tendency to self-expression. On the other hand, the follow- 
ing description, by Herbart, of the normal condition of the 
mind, may serve to illustrate his emphasis upon equilibrium. 
"As the opposite of mental delusion and of passions, the 

^Lehrbuch zur Psychohgie. Konigsberg, 1834. P»r. 118. Note i. 
*Lehrbtich zur Psychologie. 1834. Par. up. 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 87 

sound mind involves mutual determination of all concepts 
and desires through one another, or freedom from fixed ideas 
and fixed desires. As the opposite of madness and emotion, 
it involves repose and equanimity. As the opposite of 
dementia and distraction, it involves coherence and concen- 
tration of thought. As an opposite of idiocy and indolence, 
it involves excitability and sprightliness."^ Only the last 
sentence emphasises progress, and its terms are hardly satis- 
factory to the idealist. To Froebel, to idealism, a sound mind 
is an organised system of tendencies making for expression. 
If these have due freedom, an adequate equilibrium should 
follow of itself, but it will not be an all-sided equilibrium, 
the same for all. 

A synthesis seems to be requisite and conceivable. One 
may regard the mind as normally in equilibrium, but it 
must be a moving equilibrium ; or one may regard it as a 
force, but it must be an equilibrated force. Perhaps a 
teacher may lean a little to the side of equilibrium, or of 
progress, according to the demands of his own disposition. 

3. Possibility and actuality. If the notion of an equilibrated 
character be not static, perhaps it is comparatively so, over 
against the idea of character as a development in which 
inner potentialities are to realise their utmost value. The 
former, the notion of Herbart, is almost Platonic; the latter, 
the view of Froebel, distinctly Aristotelian.* Consider for 
a moment the teleological theory of Aristotle. All develops 
from potentialities, which in themselves are neither non-being 
nor actuality. Origin is to be regarded as that which in 
actuality is not, but potentially is; its final cause is its 
validity, its form, spirit, or meaning. But, so far as present 
conditions are concerned, the development of potentialities 
to actualities is a process never complete. To us, therefore, 
potentialities are always in excess of actualities, though it is 
conceivable that they may not necessarily and eternally be 
so. For such a conception as that of God, as a Being in 
whom potentialities are realised, and in whom activity is 
not dead but equilibrated, may suggest a reconciliation be- 
tween being and becoming, permanence and activity, and 

^Lehrbuch zur Psychologic. 1834. Par. 149. 

^Aristotle. Metaphysics, Books VII. and VIII. and Book IV. Chap. XII. 



88 Herbart and Froehel. 

ideals as static and dynamic. It might be. argued that the 
Herbartian ideal of a manysided interest involves such a 
reconciliation. 

The teleological emphasis of Aristotle is in line with the 
thought of evolutionary idealism. Life is seen as a process 
of becomng, from the not-yet to the shall-be, and then from 
the shall-be, which in the act of realisation becomes ipso 
facto another not-yet, to the higher shall-be, and so forward. 
For Aristotle, potentiality is that which possesses a principle 
of development. It is that which under suitable conditions 
will of its own inner self become. Evidently, applied to 
education, the Aristotelian concept of becoming involves a 
dynamic principle, universal and endless for human experi- 
ence. And yet, the progressive ideal of the here and and 
now may have its perfect pattern viewed sub specie eternitatis. 
If so, there is no ultimate contradiction between the chang- 
ing and developing aim of Froebelian education, and the per- 
fectly equilibrated and all-sided ideal of Herbart. 

4. Being and becoming. Though it be admitted that the 
educational theory of Froebel is primarily concerned with 
potentialities, and that of Herbart with actuality as such, it 
remains true that the distinction is largely one of emphasis, 
and the opposition to a degree abstract. Herbart is further 
than Froebel from a concrete principle, because he will endow 
the soul with no original potentialities. Possibly the view of 
Froebel may be so given the benefit of the doubt as to clear- 
ness and consistency as to be brought into line with the 
suggested Aristotelian synthesis. To this synthesis may be 
ascribed both a metaphysical and an ethical side. On the 
ethical side, one has potentialities making for actualities, 
which again become potentialities for progress. In such a 
way, with Froebel, do instincts and impulses rise to the level 
of the social mind. But progress may be a mere illusion, or 
according to the suggestion of Rousseau, a real retrogression, 
unless there be a summmn bonum conditioning it. Such a 
highest good, such a perfect ideal, may be held to pervade 
progressive ideals much as permanence pervades change in 
the physical world. Change is inconceivable without perma- 
nence, because if the result of change have no identity with 
the ground of it, then there could have been nothing to be 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 80 

changed. Change then is logically necessary only for the 
finite. Physically, it seems to be within a self-identical 
system. There is according to science an ultimate ground 
of permanence in the universe, which becomes in all its parts. 
What changes, is not substance but meaning. So it may 
be held in the moral sphere, not unintelligibly, that the ulti- 
mate ground of progressive ideals is a permanent and perfect 
ideal. This ideal may conceivably be ours to the extent of 
the lights in which we learn to see it, and according to the 
meanings which we may become able to attribute to it. And 
again, the underlying permanence of the universe need not 
be dead, nor the summum bonuni motionless; but it may be 
coming towards realisation in the finite, and this realisation 
may be conceived less as dull satisfaction than perfected 
activity. 

From this point of view the perfect or Platonic idea, to 
which Herbartian educators may logically turn, may have 
an objective and real validity, and may be the standard to 
which concrete individuals approximate. The " concept " boy 
may be a real far off, divine event. Then the progressive 
ideals that are dear to the educator " by development " may 
be regarded as the filtrations of eternal truths, whose " white 
radiance " is in part disguised in the medium of life, as by 
" a dome of many-colored glass." And so this attempt at 
an ethical and educational synthesis may be offered, that 
although the immediate concern of the educator is with the 
"percept" or individual child of Froebel, he should cling 
to the belief that the "percept" child is a "concept" or 
universal child at heart. It may be added, that so far as 
class instruction in the schools is collective, it is addressed 
necessarily to the " concept " child. Herbartianism has con- 
tributed much that is valuable to the principles of class 
teaching,^ without recognising so fully as does the kinder- 
garten the worth of the individual. But the synthesis of 
collective and individual teaching is hardly to be summar- 
ised in an abstract phrase; it consists in the dynamic con- 
crete readjustment, by the teacher, of the emphasis in given 
situations. 

^Cf. e. g. Findlay, Principles of Class Teaching, London, 1904. passim. 



90 Herbart and Froehel. 

The ethical reconciliation of being and becoming, or of 
perfect and dynamic ideals, may suggest for those who are 
willing to accept it a similar modus vivendi in ontology. It 
may be argued that the fundamental problem in this branch 
of metaphysic is causation. Something is, and something 
happens; and causation, if it exist, is that which connects 
the thing that is and the thing that happens. But the pre- 
ceding discussion of being and becoming seems to suggest 
that evolution may be a more helpful category than causa- 
tion. For causation is a highly contradictory category. It 
must be continuous, and yet continuity appears to annihilate 
the distinction between cause and effect. Again, cause must 
be and yet cannot be prior in time to effect. It involves 
an indefinite regress from cause to cause ad infinitum. Prac- 
tically, causes are treated as a plurality, and yet the notion 
of a plurality of causes is logically absurd.^ Apparently 
then the most tenable view of change and of causation is 
that in which the category of evolution is involved. In short, 
there is need of a permanence to give an aspect of con- 
tinuity, simultaneity, and unity to causation, as well as a new- 
ness which gives it an aspect of change, temporal sequence 
and plurality. Apparently it is the element of permanence 
in change and causation which lies at the root of the ontology 
of Herbartian realism. The other element, quaUtative change, 
is, except in certain closed and dogmatic systems, a principle 
of idealistic ontology. It should follow that even the meta- 
physical theories of Herbart and Froebel need not be wholly 
excluded from the synthesis of an evolutionary theory of 
reality, teleologically interpreted. The permanent being of 
Herbart, and the becoming of Froebel, seem to be abstracted 
aspects of this more concrete principle. But the suggestions 
for a synthesis in this section are confessedly speculative. 

5. Intellectualism and voluntarism. In the field of ethics, the 
opposition of Herbart and Froebel may be illustrated not 
only in relation to the problems of freedom and the ideal, 
but also in relation to the question of how to educate char- 
acter. It is true that Herbart no less than Froebel aims 
at the good will as the end of education. Since Kant, repeats 

'Cf. Tht Elements of Metaphysics. A. E. Taylor. London, 1903. 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. gi 

Herbart, nothing else can be called good but the good will.^ 
Character then is the thing desired. Notwithstanding, within 
this consensus, it would appear that Herbart and Froebel 
respectively emphasise intellect and feeling. If now the in- 
tellect and feeling be set obstinately over against one another, 
or if the will be regarded as a third coordinate factor with 
them, and no more, then there does not seem to be a tenable 
ground for a synthesis. But it is perhaps preferable to 
regard feeling and intellect as the content of the mind at 
a given plane of intersection. Then the will is the mind 
in action, or in the exercise of its function of controlling 
experience. From this point of view, thought as distinguished 
from feeling will refer to the focus of mental strain; and 
the marginal element in consciousness will be present essen- 
tially as feeling. Such a psychological analysis may pave 
the way for a synthesis of the emphasis of Herbart upon 
thought with the emphasis laid by Froebel upon feeling. 
The psychological ground of the synthesis will be, that the 
mind is only concrete as will; that thinking is teleologically 
conditioned with reference to willing, or more simply, that 
it functions as a means to the control of activities; and that 
feeling may be regarded as a dynamo, which provides a 
" head " or motive power for thought and action. 

For Herbart the will depends upon ideas, which in turn 
are externally provided. Herbart experienced a difficulty 
in reconciling the determinism of this hypothesis with the 
moral sanction of personal responsibility. In order to escape 
from this dilemma he advanced a doctrine as it were of 
two wills. He distinguished sharply between character as 
objective and as subjective.^ The will before reflection differs 
from the will after reflection. In accordance with this change, 
educational methodology has to effect a transition from the 
appeal to external control to a reliance upon inner self- 
discipline.^ In a word, the will before reflection is deter- 
mined; after reflection, free. The self before reflection is 
a product; after it, an agent. The distinction is not only 
significant ; but within limits acceptable. But by what magic 

'Herbart refers to Kant. GrundUgMng tur MeUiphysik der SitUH. Section i. 
^Cf. Pad. Schirft. hrsg. Willman. Leipiig, 1880. II. pp. 457-8- 
^Ibid. II. p. 534. 



92 Herbart and Froehel. 

can there be a transition from a purely objective to a sub- 
jective will? Can freedom and self-control rest upon a 
basis of mere determinism? Nay, one is compelled to answer, 
the objective will must have contained in itself the implicit 
principle of selfhood. But this is evoUitionary idealism, and 
not the philosophy of Herbart. 

The contradiction that is involved in a rigid distinction 
between the subjective will and the objective will is reflected 
in Herbartian educational theory. Herbart himself attacked 
only transcendental freedom ; and not inner freedom or 
freedom in general.^ But the educator qua educator is to 
be a determinist. " The freedom principle," writes Hayward, 
" sounds well in university class-rooms, and may, indeed, 
represent a fundamental philosophical truth ; but as an edu- 
cational maxim it is useless if not pernicious." And again : 
" We must be, in so far as we are educators, determinists."^ 
But for Froebel, education is a process of liberation, and 
even of the exercise of freedom or selfactivity. The notion 
that freedom may be a fundamental truth, and yet obnoxious 
in education, is worthy of a science of casuistry. But the 
Herbartian who is willing to admit, in the objective will, 
an implicit principle of conscious self-control, is virtually on 
the way to the suggested telcological and evolutionary 
synthesis. 

The relation of the will to thought and feeling was dif- 
ferently conceived by Herbart and by Froebel. Herbart 
as well as Froebel would have the child to be an active agent.^ 
For Herbart : "Action generates the will out of desire."* 
Action, that is, is the immediate ancestor of the will ; but 
action itself depends upon desire, which in the Herbartian 
psychology is essentially a product of ideas. Herbart adds : 
" But capacity and opportunity are necessary to action."^ 
To this Froebel would have agreed, though he might have 
wished to add that action is a factor even in the making 
of opportunities. For Herbart, thought is essentially prior 
to action; for Froebel, action is rather prior to thought. Her- 

^Pcidagogische Schriften. (Sallwurk). II. p. 227. Note. 
^The Secret of Herbart. 1004. p. 30. 

^Padagogische Schr-iften. [Sallwurk]. I. pp. 233-4. Or see Felkin, The Science of Edu- 
cation, p. 210. 
^Ibid. I. p. 228. 



Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 93 

bart practically deduced the will out of thought through desire. 
Froebel, on the other hand, proceded from inner desire to 
thought by way of action and will. So far as Herbart may 
over-emphasise ideas, or Froebel feeling, in relation to will, 
a synthesis has already been suggested. For the will has 
been regarded as the concrete and dynamic mind of which 
intellect and feeling are sectional phases. 

From the point of view of an evolution interpreted in the 
light of ideals, the synthesis may be somewhat differently 
expressed. Feeling then appears to constitute the terminus 
of origin, and selfconscious activity to characterise the goal. 
Feeling and thought are then not opposites but co-laborers 
in personal activity. In the evolution from mere feeling 
to a higher form of self-consciousness, feeling, as motive 
power, is not lost ; but persists along with thought, the guid- 
ing hand. But evolutionary idealism may suggest a synthesis 
that runs deeper still. It may suggest, on the side of origin, 
that thought can only have arisen out of a feeling whose 
ultimate nature and basis is rational. And again, the thought 
that enters into the goal of feeling, while it does not eradi- 
cate sense, really does attempt to reorganise sense upon a 
higher plane. So the naturalness, the sympathy of Froebel 
may be reconciled with the clear mental vision of Herbart. 
If both reason and feeling function in activity, then reason 
is not for the elimination of feelings, or even of passions; 
but rather for their location, adaptation and control. 

6. The education of character. The intellectualism of Her- 
bartian, the voluntarism of Froebelian education aim alike 
at the goal of character. But if there be any validity in the 
Aristotelian distinction between goodness of intellect and 
goodness of character, of which the former is declared to 
be of time and teaching, and the latter of habit, then Her- 
bart and Froebel may be said to respectively represent these 
abstract terms of the mental series. Herbart represents 
goodness of intellect, and the formative aspect of time and 
teaching upon such goodness. Froebel represents goodness 
of character, born of the habit of moral activity. This good- 
ness is equally amenable to education, so far as education 
is content with the guidance of inner activities, though it 
is of a kind liable to rebel against dogmatism. But the anti- 



94 Herbart and Froebel. 

thesis is imperfect, and largely a tribute to emphasis. Per- 
haps so far as one may look at goodness in a quasi-Platonic 
way, that is to say, as an intellectual possession, it is Her- 
bart who indicates how education may promote it. But, 
when the question is of the good in use, or when one's 
attitude is Aristotelian, then Froebel may become the more 
helpful. Herbart, regarding the mind as it were in cross 
section, justly emphasises the ethical import of the mental 
content which a cross section appears to reveal; just as 
Froebel, seeing the mind as process, prefers to lay stress 
upon the tenor of its activities. Herbart may be right to 
the extent that even a transcendental will can hardly act 
without a content; Froebel to the degree that no content, 
which is merely a content, or merely objective, can possibly 
give birth to a subject mind. 

If indeed the case stand so, then Herbart and Froebel 
may correct one another where there is direst need of recti- 
fication. Herbart has contributed to moral teaching an 
emphasis upon the power of ideas in the making of char- 
acter.^ It may also be well that he should have treated 
morality as a thing not given, but produced in the process 
of living. And yet, each time that the educator would put 
into practice the recipe of Herbart for man-making, let 
Froebel remind him that he is dealing with a personality 
having potentialities as unfathomable as his own. If the 
educator can establish no sympathetic communion with this 
cognate will, his house of moral instruction is built on a 
foundation no better than sand. 

Kf. Padagogische SchrijUn. (Sallwurk). pp. 114-5- 



CHAPTER IV. 

An Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 

In the course of the preceding chapters, attempts have 
been made to anticipate to a degree the synthesis of Her- 
bart and Froebel in the field of education. And chiefly, the 
problem of the education of character, the problem of freedom 
in education, and the problem of the nature and possibility 
of knowledge have received explicit attention. It now appears 
to be necessary to devote a chapter to the synthetic treat- 
ment of more technical educational categories. 

I. Society and the curriculum. Both for Herbart and for 
Froebel, the curriculum is a system of social values. By 
its agency, or rather by the agency of the process of educa- 
tion to which it ministers, the individual is to be socialised. 
In a relatively static society, such as that of the Chinese 
tradition, the attempt may be made to promote an adjust- 
ment of the individual to his environment with a finality 
that is foreign to the spirit of western civilisation. But in a 
democracy, the curriculum will be formulated with the aim 
of adjusting individuals to social ideals rather than to any 
state of society that has been fully actualised. It will be 
in a manner sensitive to the progressive reorganisation of 
individual and social functions. Its value will be to pro- 
mote cooperation, the possibility of an adequate specialisa- 
tion of functions, and the due relation of the theoretical to 
the practical life. Its tendency is to divide into two sections, 
of which the sciences, industries, and sundry processes form 
one, and that the democratic section, while the humanities 
form the other section, which tends to be intellectual and 
aristocratic. The Herbartian tendency is to emphasise the 
latter aspect of the curriculum. The Froebelian bias, at 
least in the occupations and gifts, is rather towards processes. 
But a synthesis may be conceived, wherein the humanities 
may become practical, and science and the manual arts 
human. Indeed it would appear that for a synthetic educa- 
tional system art and industry, or rather the cultural and 



96 Herbart mid Froebel. 

the occupational side of the curriculum, represented in a 
way by Herbart and Froebel respectively, should go hand 
in hand. There are obvious anticipations of this view in 
Ruskin and Morris, and in the whole movement of the arts 
and crafts. 

Herbart appears to draw nearer than Froebel to the com- 
mon-sense view of education, as the attempt to get a curric- 
ulum of facts into the minds of the less mature members 
of society. The element of truth in this view may be the 
principle, that the curriculum is not according to nature in 
any primitive or original sense; but rather according to 
culture, or civilisation, or if you will, nature teleologically 
interpreted. The Herbartian analysis of the curriculum is 
distinctively cultural. Indeed, the followers of Herbart have 
relied so much upon the achievements of the race, that in 
their anxiety to recapitulate these achievements, in extreme 
cases they have almost closed their eyes to the necessity 
for further progress. For epochs of culture can tell of little 
more than historic fact, so far as even this is known ; and 
value can only be attributed to such fact in the light of the 
needs and aspirations of the present day. Not only Herbart 
but Froebel also has the social ideal. It will be indicated 
that Froebel, for his part, may at times have wavered between 
the standards of civilisation and original nature, and so 
between the normative and genetic methods. He may have 
been justified in his many concessions to original nature, to 
the extent that education is a process of the liberation as well 
as the guidance of the human spirit. At least, so far as 
Froebel may have emphasised original activities, and Her- 
bart cultural values, the following adjustment of emphasis 
may be offered. Genetic method may criticise, illustrate, 
amplify, and interpret; but only out of civilisation are born 
the fundamental standards of the valuable. The genetic 
method is itself unintelligible apart from a supplementary 
reflux of light from the zone of adult achievement. 

It may be desirable to add, that to a certain degree both 
Herbart and Froebel attained to the reconciliation of a norma- 
tive with a genetic methodology. The method of Froebel 
mav be said to have been the guidance of a socialising 
process, by means of material drawn from what the child 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 97 

at each successive stage of his development may be able 
to see as at unity with himself. The criterion of Herbart 
may be even more normative, and less genetic; yet these 
two aspects may be discriminated also in it. It is the body 
of racial experience, therefore an ulterior end; and yet this 
end is to be attained by a sort of genetic process of the 
recapitulation of culture epochs. Thus both Herbart and 
Froebel have attempted, each in his own way, to reconcile 
genesis with aim. 

2. Educational values. The school of Herbart represents 
to a degree a theory of the gradation of culture values. It 
sets for example the humanities above the study of nature. 
There appears to be a species of validity in the stress upon 
culture, which man has achieved, over against such a nature, 
say, as Rousseau had posited in his curriculum for the educa- 
tion of Emile. Yet ultimately the sciences, which some have 
opposed to culture as if they were original and given truths 
of nature, are as truly human achievements as the humanities. 

With Froebel, nature might seem to be preferred above 
culture. But his standard of value in the occupations and 
gifts is social. And, even were this not so, his spiritual 
interpretation of nature would bestow a human significance 
upon the study of it. Thus the possibility of a reconciliation 
between Herbart and Froebel is suggested. But what form 
shall the synthesis take? Have all subjects of the curriculum, 
rightly methodised, an equal educational value? Not so, if 
equal means the same, and any other sense of the word is 
here unintelligible. Manual training, however treated, can 
hardly have the same educational value as poetry. Rather, 
for practical purposes, their values are not wholly commen- 
surable. But the following suggestion for a synthesis en- 
deavours to allow for what is valid in the views of both 
Herbart and Froebel. It seeks to preserve the theory of 
Herbart, that the subjects of the curriculum have different 
and graded values, without a denial of Froebel's principle 
of the essential unity of man and nature. The suggestion 
is this, that while there are subjects in the curriculum which 
possess specialised and to a degree graded values, yet the 
very existence of these subjects is determined by human 
7 



98 Herbart and Froehel. 

needs. Thus the values of the subjects of the curriculum 
are not the creation of independent compartments of original 
fact. They are indeed determined by the indispensableness 
of the relationships that may be established between the ideal 
set up by society, and the needs and aspirations of the indi- 
vidual life. Then, if this be so, the subjects of the school 
curriculum are logical divisions imposed by the social spirit 
upon the material of knowledge for the realisation of human 
purposes. The value of a school subject is essentially the 
extent to which it may be made to minister to those purposes. 
3. Correlation omcI concentration. Just as the subjects of 
the curriculum are related as to their value by a common 
reference to human purposes, so it seems reasonable to 
correlate them as to their content in the process of teach- 
ing. Correlation is one of the practical recommendations of 
the school of Herbart. Froebel also related the activities 
of the child to a central object; but correlation is not the 
same conception with Froebel as with Herbart. For Her- 
bart, correlation is based upon a theory of association of 
ideas in the individual mind. That the life of thought be 
not sporadic, ideas must be associated according to a process 
directed by the teacher from without. Without instruction 
to complete the organisation of ideas, the house of thought, 
and thence of will, might be divided against itself so that 
it could not stand. To Froebel, however, correlation is just 
the recognition of the fundamental oneness of the individual 
with society. For the curriculum is a systematised sum- 
mary of civilisation, held in the social medium. The indi- 
vidual, however, is in purpose and function social. Correla- 
tion, then, is from this point of view a process of carrying 
over the inward unity of the self to the field of its mani- 
festation or liberation. Froebel's is perhaps the truer notion 
of correlation, in that correlation is not of and among ex- 
ternals, but of social norms and the individual life. Even 
so, Herbart has done more than Froebel, on the technical 
side, for the recognition of correlation as a principle. To 
the extent of the validity of his psychology of the blendings 
and fusions of ideas he has given an invaluable account of 
its educational functions. It is not to be forgotten that the 
curriculum itself exists in a medium of thought, that thought 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 99 

to be worthy of the name must be organised and vital, and 
that in the curriculum must be preserved at once the vitality, 
the reality of the outer world, and of the child also. The 
correlation which tends to externality, including that which 
forms the essence of the Herbartian methodology, has to be 
fitted together with the methodology of the little child. 
Probably indeed the feasibility of so delicate a task may hinge 
upon an hereditary harmony of the child with society. 

So far as concentration means technically a particular 
variety of correlation, it is opposed in principle to the co- 
ordination of a number of equivalent groups. In concentra- 
tion there is one main topic about which others are grouped. 
In co-ordination there may be a number of such topics, as 
with Dr. Harris, five.^ Froebel's correlation is of the con- 
centric type; now all centers about the ball, and anon about 
another and yet another gift or occupation. Perhaps there 
is something lacking about almost all formulations of the 
principle of correlation. Even that which relates the school 
to life,^ and reflects the life unity in the school curriculum, 
may be open to misinterpretation. For it would seem that 
the true life unity is an ideal or teleological unity; and that 
the true correlation is not after all a mere unity of reference 
to the life of the moment, so much as a unity of application 
in a system of ends. 

4. The formal steps of method. Thus far, little has been 
said of method as such. At the same time, it has been 
suggested that curriculum and method are after all the same 
thing considered in different aspects. The curriculum is an 
organisation of civilisation, an institutional affair. Like all 
institutions, it is therefore in essence a method. Institutions 
are the methods through and in which society conveys to 
individuals its social norms. The curriculum may be viewed 
as such a means or method. It seems to follow that the 
current distinction between curriculum and method can only 
refer to a given something viewed statically or habitually, 
and the same thing viewed dynamically. Method, if you 
will, is dynamic curriculum. Curriculum itself is crystallised 
method. r .'• 



^Psychological Foundations of Education. In International Education Series, p. 323. 
^Cf. The School and Society. Dewey, p. 107. 



100 Herbart and Froebel. 

A serious consequence of the stated relation of matter 
to method is that no formal method should aspire to uni- 
versal validity. For if method be the subject matter as 
dynamic, it cannot be uniform, unless the subject matter 
be so. Yet modern Herbartians tend to assume a uniformity 
of method in educational operations. For instance, they would 
begin each set recitation with a period of review, according 
to the routine engendered by the mechanical tendency of a 
psychology of mere associationism. It might be more scientific 
in principle to regulate reviews by the demands of the par- 
ticular situation. The function of reviews may be less to 
secure knowledge, or clearness, than power. In that case, 
the ultimate criterion of the necessity of reviews may be the 
need of energising an achieved mental content. 

This illustration may suggest a further argument against 
the uniformity of the method of the recitation. The first 
argument was, that method cannot be uniform, because it is 
dynamic subject matter, and subject matter is not uniform. 
Now by dynamic subject matter is meant, the curriculum 
as functioning with the mind of the child. Two causes 
evidently preclude the uniformity of this functioning. In the 
first place, as has been said, the subject matter varies; and 
in the second place the mind of the child varies. Method 
ought then to concede somewhat to individuality ; for to make 
it uniform is to explain away something of the concreteness 
of life. 

Finally, it is to be said of the five formal steps that ulti- 
mately they are not logical divisions of a lesson period so 
much as principles of a psychological process. Clearness, 
association, system and method^ are types of mental activity, 
although even as such it is difficult to regard them as at 
all uniform or final. 

It may not be clear that what has been said of the formal 
steps has much to do with a synthesis of Herbart and Froe- 
bel. But the individual psychology of Froebel, his endeavour 
to get at the inner life of each child, makes as decisively 
for diversity of method, as the more mechanical psychology 
of Herbart makes for uniformity. And something like a 

'Herbart, Pddagogische Schriften. Sallwurk. I. p. iS7- 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. loi 

synthesis has been indicated, inasmuch as the formal steps 
of the school of Herbart are valid, to the extent that they 
may be seen to assist, in many concrete cases, the function- 
ing together of the curriculum and the child. But this will 
neither uniformly nor always be the case, according to the 
principles of the foregoing analysis. 

5. The theory of culture epochs. What has been said of the 
formal steps of method may suggest some remarks upon the 
formal theory of epochs of culture. Apparently, the child 
comes to school with a system of needs, conditioned by a 
genetic process through which he has inherited his civilised 
estate. This thought has led to such conclusions, as that 
the child is to run rapidly yet freely through recapitulatory 
stages about which hangs the aroma of a past of primitivism, 
perhaps even of arboreal and piscatorial life. Early child- 
hood has been regarded as a period in which these phases 
of origin may be worked out and worked off, especially in 
play. Play in this sense, as spontaneous, is opposed to work. 
This antithesis is at variance with Froebel's thought of play, 
that it is, or should be, an anticipation of social function. 
Without doubt the child mind is apt to behave in a manner 
that suggests many typical primitive activities. If this be 
an evolutionary recurrence, or any kind of atavistic phe- 
nomenon, it is probably more desirable to guide such mani- 
festations than to obstruct them. For recapitulatory activities 
that are in line with social evolution may be expected to 
be amenable to a measure of social control. 

The older Herbartians used to dogmatise about culture 
epochs, lacking either a standard of value for the alleged 
primitive activities, an analysis of what these may really 
be, a reasonable historical perspective of the order of their 
recurrence, or a notion of where to begin or end with them. 
Should one begin with, or educate for, the aquatic stage, 
if ever one existed? Or should education first take cog- 
nisance of simian activities, or those of primitive man; or 
if first of the latter, of what kind or stage of him? Accord- 
ing to Sallwiirk, the error of Ziller, Staude and Rein is that 
they have omitted to establish a real correspondence between 
individual and racial development. " Lack of the historic 



102 Herbart and Froebel. 

sense is above all a characteristic of the Zillerian school."^ 
But though the fact of correspondence be admitted, it affords 
no standard of educational values. It becomes for education 
a mere emphasis on the significance of impulses as such, 
apart from their quality, and apart from their desirability. 
Indeed, it may also be held to affect the order in which 
parts of the curriculum should be presented to the child. 
But the question of the priority of subject to subject in time 
appears to be in part determined by the interests appealed 
to and the methods employed. 

It might be possible for Herbart and Froebel to agree that 
genetic epochs of culture matter to education only at second 
hand. That is to say, even if the historic culture of the race 
were fully known and understood, its worth would have to 
be estimated in terms of the standards erected by modern 
intelligence. For example, the hunting instinct as such is 
not to be cultivated merely because at one time it may 
have been vital to human subsistence. It is only to be 
cultivated in so far as the hunting activity retains a value 
in the present constitution of society. And so, just as 
Froebel appreciated play not merely as impulse, but also as 
something implicitly social, Herbart may have really empha- 
sised the Odyssey less for its mere priority in human experi- 
ence than for its social value. Thus it does not seem im- 
possible to reconcile what is reasonable in a theory of epochs 
of culture, and the recapitulation of them, with twentieth 
century standards of worth. 

6. Technique. The formal steps, and certain " culture 
epoch " curricula, are among the indications of the strength 
of Herbartianism on the side of technique. This does not 
appear to be accidental, but a natural consequence of the 
Herbartian tendency to centralise the education process rather 
as it were in the teacher than the child.- Herbart himself, it 
is true, did not emphasise technicalities so much as his school 
has done. " I am not such a fool," he wrote, " as to imagine 
that the salvation of mankind depends on such trifling aids, 
which may more or less lighten the burden of instruction."^ 

^Sallwiirk. Handel und Wandelder PddagogtscherSchule Herbarts. Langensalza, 1885, p. 39. 
^Cf. Pddagogische Schriften. hrsg. SallwCirk, I. p. 183. Or Felkin, Science of Educa- 
tion. Boston 1902. p. 150. 

^Pddagogische Schriften. hrsg. Sallwurk. I. p. 183. 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 103 

Yet the mathematical and mechanical bias of the psychology 
of Herbart has lent itself to a high degree of technical elabora- 
tion. Froebel, for his part, seems to care less for technique 
than for the spirit of instruction. For him, the mother is 
the queen of teachers. It is quite a question whether indeed 
the teacher should rely more upon settled devices, or upon 
initiative, charged as it should perhaps be from the dynamo 
of feeling. The teacher of zeal and enthusiasm may make 
his curriculum dynamic, and therefore self-methodising. On 
the other hand, mere enthusiasm without technique is lack- 
ing in economy. If it be conceivable that the very science, 
the very technique, the very habit of education may be 
informed by passion, then in such a temper do I conceive 
the reconciliation of the spirit of Herbart and Froebel to 
lie. According to this view, formal devices, formal methods, 
are apt to be valuable in proportion as they are or become 
the teacher's own. They need to be energised and animated 
by an adequate force of will and feeling. 

7. Instruction. For Froebel, the activities of the child 
appear to regulate the method of instruction. But, accord- 
ing to Herbart, it is better to leave method in the hands of 
the teacher. There is a sense in which one cannot but 
adopt the view of Herbart. The teacher, not the child, 
reflects upon the method of instruction ; therefore the teacher, 
not the child, is able to control it. Moreover, Herbart 
believed as fully as Froebel that the teacher should defer 
in his instruction to psychological modes of activity. But 
Herbart conceived these modes differently from Froebel, For 
Herbart they were mathematical, for Froebel rather " divine;" 
for Herbart typical, for Froebel individual; for Herbart plas- 
tic, for Froebel to a degree elastic. Now if the mind be 
mathematical, uniform and plastic, it is clear that instruction 
will be for education, like motley for Jacques, "the only 
wear." "I admit," confessed Herbart, "having no notion 
of education without instruction, just as conversely I can 
imagine no instruction that does not educate."^ 

But for Froebel education is as much by appetition as 
instruction. It is not, as it is with Herbart,- a process of 

^Allgemeine Padagoeik. X. Par. ii. ^ ^ „ ■ c- ■ t ttj .■ 

^Padagogische Schrtften. hrsg. Sallwiirk. I. p. 210. Or Felkin, Sctence of Educatton. 
Boston, 1902. p. 192. 



I04 Herbart and Froebel. 

filling the mind from without. For the child cries out for 
education. In a certain sense, and from a certain point of 
view, the child is his own instructor. It may not be difficult 
to reconcile in some measure this mode of emphasis upon 
inner activity with the emphasis of Herbart upon instruction. 
Writers like Linde have conceived a synthetic " developing- 
presentative method."^ The problem may resolve itself into 
this form : does the environment fashion the child, or the 
child the environment? If the former, then education is 
instruction merely; if the latter, it resembles the develop- 
ment of a Leibnitzian monad, as a process moving entirely 
from within outward. But in this extreme form neither 
hypothesis is tenable. If life be of the nature of an inter- 
action of organism with environment, then neither can be 
ultimately conceived as static. In fact, the environment 
unbends to the child, and so far as may be accommodates 
itself to him, from birth to maturity. Conceive education 
then as interaction; and the antithesis between instruction, 
and development from within, loses its absolute character. 
For the teacher will still instruct, without depriving the 
child of freedom. He will not create men according to his 
will, as Herbart would almost suggest,^ neither will he abstain 
from interference with " nature." But his function, in a word, 
will be guidance. The possibility of guidance may depend 
upon the communion which the teacher enjoys on the one 
hand with the child, and on the other hand with the environ- 
ment with which the child interacts. In any case, into guidance 
there enter two factors, whether we know them as nature 
and culture, or origin and value, or the child and the curri- 
culum, or the individual and society. To emphasise the 
former in each pair of categories is to emphasise freedom ; 
to lay stress upon the latter in each case indicates pre- 
occupation with control. Freedom is perhaps the more Froe- 
belian principle; but into it enters social control. Control 
is the message of Herbart; but freedom is smuggled into it 
through the gate of interest. In a synthesis, what is needed 
appears to be a redistribution of the balance of emphasis. 
Such a redistribution may be suggested by the term guidance. 

'^Cf. Linde, Der darstellende Unterricht. p. 49. 

^Cf. e. g. Pddagogische Schriften. Sallwiirk. I. p. 173. 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 105 

It is true that guidance is interference ; but it is not so much 
interference with activities, as interference for activities. 

8. Education for vocation. Herbart and Froebel are agreed 
that the purpose of instruction is to promote character. But 
it is desirable to give to character a very definite content. 
For instance, is character a possession of the individual, or 
the mode of his functioning? In concrete cases this ques- 
tion generally takes a narrower form. Is education, in the 
narrower sense of the word, cultural; or is it essentially 
vocational? Thus on the one hand, some culture seems due 
to the individual as the birthright of his manhood. If man 
has a higher nature, higher possibilities, it is ultimately for 
these possibilities and for this nature that education is. Her- 
bart therefore felt that education should produce many-sided 
and cultured men. Education, he said, does not work for the 
calling, the vocation, in life.^ But everything depends upon 
the interpretation of vocation so-called. With Froebel, edu- 
cation is for vocation, but not for any trade or superficial 
occupation merely. Vocation according to Froebel is a 
" divine " calling to make the best of one's possibilities. But 
vocation in this ethical sense is not inconsistent with the 
Herbartian definition of the end of education. The difiference 
is perhaps this, that for Herbart it is an outer voice that calls ; 
an inner voice for Froebel. And again, the principles of 
Froebel, unlike those of Herbart, are not very definitely 
opposed to education for vocation in the more utilitarian 
sense. The soul, thought Froebel, can find freedom and 
realisation not only in history, and literature, and mathe- 
matics, but again in the trivial round of daily opportunity. 

Indeed, in a modern society there needs to be education 
for specialised function. For consider society as a member- 
ship, or as an organism, if " organism " be interpreted not 
merely on a biological plane, but psychically. Society then 
appears to be a " vicarious " system, an association of men 
to bear one another's burdens, an organisation of innumer- 
able functions, an attempt at an equilibration of many dif- 
ferentiated occupations and pursuits. This is the character 
of society in Plato's ideal republic, where men are to be 
counsellors, artists, soldiers, according to innate fitness and 

^Padagogische Schriften. (Sallwurk). I. p. 233. 



io6 Herbart and Froebel. 

public training. It persists not only in ideal communities, 
such as More's Utopia and the New Atlantis of Bacon ; but 
in all historical societies and states, in republics, monarchies, 
oligarchies, and conspicuously in feudal organisations. In 
certain respects regard for the highly specialised organism 
of twentieth century society appears likely to swell the cry 
for an education for vocation to an irresistible clamor. 
Science has already been forced into the curriculum by social 
needs, so that the literae humaniores are no longer without a 
r'val. Manual training is said to have many values; but 
perhaps ultimately it is in an industrial bias that its strength 
in public opinion lies. Indeed, the two facts that have done 
more than anything else to establish a vocational emphasis 
in education are probably the development of public opinion 
as a social force and the industrial character of the present 
age. Industry has strong claims upon the patience if not 
devotion of an educator. It has come to color the literature, 
the science, the art, the politics, and the whole life of the 
present. It has reorganised society on a commercial basis. 
It has made factories instead of families the units of work. 
It has made actual a broad culture and a high standard 
of luxury such as were previously only possible to the lim- 
ited few. It may soon aflford to all workers an unprecedented 
margin of leisure. It would seem therefore to be a social 
duty to educate for the transmission and development of the 
processes of industry that have done so much for the higher 
values of life, and may do so much more. And, again, the 
case for industry is prima facie a case for vocational training, 
if only because specialised vocational functioning is the 
chief principle of the organisation of modern industrial 
development. 

Therefore, at the present day, one dare hardly sever edu- 
cation from vocation so sharply as did Herbart. Herbartians 
may be fundamentally right in attributing, say to the Odyssey, 
a greater culture value than to manual training. And yet, Greek 
is only for the few, and if manual training be culturally 
treated, it may be possible to atone for a conceivable loss 
in intensity by the wider extension of educational influence. 
Such a plea, did they stand in need of it, might also justify 
the place of nature study and science in the school cur- 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 107 

riculum. The vocational, the industrial, tends to be scientific 
and physical. The aim of the teacher then will be, to 
humanise science and to idealise nature. So far as this may- 
be done, Herbart and Froebel at their best are reconciled. 
For now, first, in industrial training there will be a basis 
for ultimate vocational efficiency. Second, in its idealisation, 
there will be a foundation for reconciling the work with the 
personality. Third, in industrial training for all, there will 
be laid the groundwork of a social sympathy even between 
classes whose interests at present almost lack a point of 
contact. Fourth, the traditions of a democratic society will 
be so far respected, that without abandoning the notion that 
each man has a place, the set and rigid distinctions of a 
caste system may be avoided, and the opportunity be left 
to each individual to make a place for himself according 
to the potentialities of his nature and the quality of his 
energies. 

II. 

Thus far, the attempt has been made in this chapter to 
indicate the possibility of a synthesis of Herbart and Froebel 
in the direction of curriculum and method. Without 'alto- 
gether forsaking these topics, the second part of the chapter 
will center about the traditional opposition of nature and 
culture. In a sense, Froebel stands for the emphasis upon 
nature; and Herbart for the emphasis upon culture. Is it 
possible to reconcile the principle of education according to 
nature with that of education for an institutional life? 

I. Nature and civilisation. Rousseau appears to have mis- 
taken the stagnancy of the institutions of his day for sheer 
degeneracy. He even came to consider civilisation as a fall 
from a better and happier state of nature. To him, then, 
it logically seemed better for education to follow nature 
rather than to follow civilisation. Thus for Emile, at least 
so far as common sense would tolerate such a doctrine, 
instincts and tendencies were to be everything, curriculum 
nothing. Back to nature lay the path of man. This note 
helped to stir Lessing and Herder, Kant and Pestalozzi, 
Goethe and Schiller, Froebel and Herbart. It tended to lib- 
erate thought and to " emphasise feeling. With Pestalozzi 



io8 Herbart and Froebel. 

it found part and lot in educational theory and practice. Fol- 
lowing nature, becoming a child with the child, is one aspect 
of the doctrine of Froebel. But to Froebel and Pestalozzi 
there was no ultimate opposition between nature and culture. 
Herbart was even convinced that culture or civilisation is 
prior to nature in education. He may be said to have led 
a distinct reaction against the educational views of Rousseau. 
" To leave man to nature, or even to wish to lead him to, 
and train him up in, nature, is mere folly. . . . We 
know our aim, nature does much to aid us, and humanity 
has gathered much on the road she has already traversed; 
it is our task to pin them together."^ But before we proceed 
to pin them together, there is a question to be answered. 
What is nature? There is perhaps no other category so 
ambiguous. At the least, the following senses of the term 
are distinguishable and vital to the present topic. To the 
scientist, nature is an externality to be accurately described. 
To the poet, nature is a background to human emotion. To 
the idealist, nature is the expression of spirit or reason. To 
Rousseauists, nature is primitivism or origin. And to the 
moralist, nature is that which ought to be. To Froebel 
nature tends to mean a sort of combination of all of these. 
In the last analysis, as nature is to him something social 
and divine, he is not very far from Herbart. 

The opposition of nature and culture is sometimes expressed 
as an opposition of heredity and environment, or nature and 
nurture. In Huxley and Matthew Arnold the antithesis, 
nature versus culture, leads to a respective emphasis upon the 
sciences and the humanities as factors in the educational 
curriculum. " The distinctive character of our own times," 
said Huxley, " lies in the vast and constantly increasing part 
which is played by natural knowledge."^ And again ; "For 
all those who mean to make science their serious occupa- 
tion ; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine ; 
or who have to enter early upon the business of life ; for 
all these, in my opinion, classical education is a mistake."^ 
This reads not unlike a criticism of the type of curriculum 
suggested by Herbart. It raises the question, for instance, 

*^ '^Pddagogische Schriften [SaWwurk]. I. p. 164. 
^ ^Science and Culture. New York, 1888. p. 21. 
fi^^Ibid. p. 23. 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 109 

whether the Odyssey is a suitable center for a modern curric- 
ulum. Its reality is not quite a modern reality. Froebel, 
for his part, preferred to begin with the near at hand.^ He 
seemed to prefer, even in song and story, an idealised actuality 
to an imported mythology. But over against Huxley, Mat- 
thew Arnold has a word to add on behalf of culture. What, 
he asks, is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, 
and lose himself, forfeit himself?^ For nature is indeed what 
he works from and with, but dare he neglect art and litera- 
ture, or the wealth of emotional exercise in poetry and elo- 
quence? Even for the sake of science, it cannot be. 

Synthetically then, the educator will endeavour to find 
nature in culture, and culture in nature. He will seek to 
combine nature and culture, if not like Froebel in a poetic 
or romantic way, then like Herbart in a reasonable confidence 
that the achievements of the race, which constitute the objects 
of culture, are in the truest sense, natural. In education, 
nature is to be civilised, humanised, idealised; and culture is 
not to be confounded with artificiality, or attributed merely 
to one selected kind of subject matter. The knowledge for 
the sake of knowledge of the scientist, the art for art's sake 
of the humanist, are for education, if taken alone and of 
themselves, equally inadequate categories. There could only 
be an ultimate antinomy between nature and culture if by 
some means an individual were born outside of society, and 
suddenly dragged within it. 

2. Education by institutions. Although culture is ultimately 
an appeal to social values, mere literary culture is not 
socialisation. For this reason Herbart, with all his appre- 
ciation of literature, conceived a less social process of educa- 
tion than did Froebel. He did not care primarily for educa- 
tional institutions; but even retained a preference for 
individual tuition. But for Froebel, the school was insti- 
tutional. It was an evolution out of the home and vocation. 
Especially in the Mother Plays are there many glimpses of 
an adapted institutionalism.^ The institution of the kinder- 
garten was looked upon by Froebel less as a private enter- 
prise than a permanent social factor contributing to the 

^Cf. e. g. Pedagogics of the Kindergarten. New York. 1895. p. 22. 
^Cf. Discourses in America. London. 1889. Literature and Science. 
^Cf. e. g. Der%kleine Zeichner. 



no Herhart and Froebel. 

higher life of the German people. In a speech made in his 
old age at the opening of the first Burghers' Kindergarten 
in Hamburg, Froebel never once abandoned " the thought 
of a uniting education satisfying the individual in all his 
relations."^ But with the Herbartians, and notably Ziller, 
there is no such emphasis upon the needs of the social whole.^ 
And again, the desperate endeavours of Froebel to found 
educational institutions had no parallel with Herbart himself. 
From one point of view, the several basic institutions, 
including the home, the school, the state, the vocation and 
the church, are methods by which society conveys to indi- 
viduals an adaptative and controlling power in experience. 
Through institutions, again, individuals are admitted into 
partnership with larger social groups. But although insti- 
tutions have these general functions in common, their offices 
in the social economy are in a measure delimited. The state, 
indeed, has a station among them that is legally rather than 
actually unique. On paper the state is omnipotent. In a 
way it supervises the endeavours of its fellow institutions, 
and is the residuary legatee of such of their functions as 
remain unfulfilled. In this way certain states and cities are 
coming to employ the kindergarten to supplement the de- 
ficiencies of educational influences in the family. This is 
wholly in the spirit of Pestalozzi and Froebel. " You shall 
do for your children what their parents fail to do for them," 
are the words of Gertrude to the schoolmaster.^ '* The 
primary, indispensable requisite of education at this period," 
wrote Froebel, " is the union of the school and the family."* 
But unto Herbartians, for whom the teacher rather creates 
than trains the mind, the family is a disturbing element. 
At this day, many scientific teachers, whose inclinations are 
Herbartian, look upon the parents of their pupils as inter- 
lopers in the work of education. Perhaps, if education were 
for culture merely, or for the individual merely, then the 
teacher would be its absolute center, and the pedagogical 
works of Herbart might be its sufficient book of method. 

*Cf. The Third Volume of Froebel' s Pedagogics. 1904. Translated by Josephine 
Jarvis. p. 18. 

^Cf. Padagogische Strdmungen an der Wende des Jahrhunderts im Gebiete der VolksschuU. 
Hanschmann, Leipzig, 1896. p. 36. 

*See Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude. In Educational Classics, p. 118. 

*Menschen Erziehung. hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 161. 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. iii 

But if education be rather for socialisation than individual 
accomplishment, then the home, or the spirit of the home, 
is still as central as it was for Froebel. This distinction 
to a degree conveys a synthesis, if it should suggest that 
the educator may seek to guide the moving balance of schol- 
astic and domestic functions. 

3. Individuality. In so far as it is consistent with the psy- 
chology of Herbart, education is wholly a process of control. 
It cannot be conceived apart from instruction. It is as it 
were the manipulation of clay by the hand of a sculptor 
of men. It is a process motivated from without. It is the 
study of a philosopher or a scientist, rather than a mutual 
commerce of satisfactions, in which the child repays the 
adult in full measure for the boon of his own socialisation. 
Unlike Froebel, Herbart could not consistently value educa- 
tion as a reciprocal process in which the privilege is partly 
on the side of the adult. One result of this difference in 
attitude between Herbart and Froebel is that Froebel had 
a more vivid intuition of the worth of the individual. But 
it has been already urged that Herbartian education tends 
to individualism by virtue of its intellectual leanings. Indi- 
vidualism, however, is not individuality. Individuality is a 
social matter. One cannot be individual without being social, 
inasmuch as it is only the process of socialisation which 
confers that harmony with environment which is the essential 
condition of freedom. But according to an Herbartian psy- 
chology, education makes not only for sociality but for 
uniformity. It makes for a set type of sociality, many- 
sidedness. The psychology of Froebel, on the other hand, 
by attributing to the soul an original character, admits of 
greater concessions to brotherly dissimilitudes and varying 
degrees of hereditary capacity. The social chord is to sound 
in harmony ; not in mere unison. But it may be that Froebel 
tends to overestimate the power of freedom which resides 
in the individual. For although, as Froebel in effect main- 
tained, the individual is not to be regarded as the product 
of facts which are foreign to his own spirit, neither is he 
so far aloof from the facts of experience as to be utterly 
independent of laws of causation. Therefore, in the attempt 
to synthesise the views of Herbart and Froebel that concern 



112 Herbart and Froehel. 

individuality, the educator will need to bring together the 
emphasis of Herbart upon causation in the sphere of mind, 
and the emphasis of Froebel upon freedom. With Herbart, 
education will construct and instruct; and with Froebel, it 
will at the same time endeavour to secure the co-operation 
of the will of the pupil as the indispensable condition of 
success. 

4. Interest. Interest may be defined as the hedonic aspect 
of thought. There persists an emotional element in the 
background of the mind. Of course thought proper, which 
in its characteristic form partakes of the nature of a stress 
or crisis, holds the foreground. What is called interest seems 
to be the background of feeling which shades into the more 
critical phases of consciousness. Interest cannot be said to 
be prior to attention, as Herbart held it to be, if it is the 
pleasure-pain aspect of attention. Yet, if it be regarded 
also as a background of which any part may upon occasion 
come into the focus of militant thought, interest would seem 
to play a part in motivation. It appears to assist the agent 
in securing a sufficiency of power to do something. 

According to this account of interest, it can hardly be 
as it was for Herbart a product of the blend and fusion of 
ideas. Interest is perhaps rather a true psychic activity, 
an aspect of self-expression, a part of the efficient cause 
of man's realisation of himself in a world of objects. As 
descriptive of a state of mind, it involves a two-fold ref- 
erence, to a natural tendency and an ideal for attainment. 
Usually pleasure is regarded as the end of interest. In so 
far as pleasure is a by-product of the realisation of the self 
in a world of objects, this may be dismissed as a psycholog- 
ical error. For if pleasure be a by-product, then to seek 
pleasure defeats its own end. Thus it seems to be an object 
rather than a feeling that is sought. Interest, then, would 
not seem to be something external which is set up as a 
standard to be achieved, so much as an original tendency 
accompanying activity. It is indeed the self-activity of Froe- 
bel regarded emotionally. 

The psychology of Herbart is a psychology of ideas. Froe- 
bel's is less so, than a voluntaristic psychology. If this 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 113 

broad distinction be maintained, a more synthetic statement 
may be made of the place of interest in a theory of educa- 
tion. Interest may be described as the hedonic aspect of 
the functioning of the self with a situation. This functioning 
is two-sided; it is conditioned by a past as with Herbart, 
and yet it is a primary impulse to realisation as with Froebel. 
Mental content is perhaps less the source than the aliment 
of interests. In the process of education, interests have less 
to be created than fed and controlled. It seems to follow 
that the ideal of a many-sided interest should give way in a 
measure to best-sided interest. For, on the side of origin, 
interests are impulses of which neither good nor bad is to 
be predicated. How then should they be at all indiscrim- 
inately or even equally developed? They are rather to be 
developed for the sake of the social situation. However, 
since interests are in the first place unmoral rather than 
immoral or moral, it is possible to make their very existence 
an argument for their cultivation. For even original powers 
and tendencies bear the stamp of a previous endorsement 
by the race ; and the presumption is that few if any of them 
are mere excrescences in the contemporary social situation. 
Over against education by interest has been set education 
by effort, or the disciplinary theory. Yet it is needless, 
and inconsistent with the facts, to oppose effort to interest. 
A synthetic attitude would only be debarred if effort implied 
distaste, or interest ease. But effort and interest are rather 
complementary. Perhaps there is no interest without effort. 
The prevalence of a contrary opinion may be due to a con- 
fusion of effort with the disagreeable. Probably, again, there 
is no effort without an interest, either mediated or imme- 
diate. It is commonly to be found that an interest at first 
external tends to become by effort more vital to the self. 
Thus if an Herbartian system of education pays too little 
attention to the developmental powers as such, a disciplinary 
system makes the error of disparaging mental content. But 
one does not train the will separately, nor the interests merely 
as such. Both are developed as related aspects of a unitary 
personality, and grow together as inseparably as control 
and freedom. 
8 



114 Herhart and Froebel. 

Finally, it may be well to summarise the conclusions which 
have been reached in the course of our attempt at a synthesis. 
The following tabulation may serve to recapitulate the line 
of thought that has been followed. But such is the nature 
of the present endeavour, that, taken of itself and apart 
from the previous context, a summary may prove to be 
neither intelligible nor convincing. Indeed, although at this 
stage, for the sake of greater clearness, the terminology of dog- 
matism may be employed, all that is said is intended only as 
the nucleus of a working hypothesis. 

1. For Froebel, the mind is a unitary activity. For Her- 
bart, ideas are independent activities. But it is possible to 
regard the ideas as dynamic, yet normally subject to a 
unitary will. 

2. The psychology of Froebel is a psychology of will and 
attention. That of Herbart is a psychology of habit. But 
habit is essentially funded attention; and attention is habit 
accommodating itself to a " crisis." 

3. The emphasis of Froebel is upon mental forms or unities ; 
that of Herbart upon content. An evolutionary theory of 
the mind, which may be teleologically interpreted, may afford 
a synthetic interpretation of the unitary process from which 
these aspects have been abstracted. For, in the concrete, 
content and form are inseparable. 

4. For Froebel, the Ego is a given principle or soul. For 
Herbart, the self is a construction. Froebel may be in the 
right to the extent that selfhood is implicitly given; and 
Herbart to the extent that it is not given explicitly. 

5. The educational theory of Froebel emphasises the self; 
and that of Herbart the situation. But the self is a focus 
of the environment; and again, the environment is an objec- 
tive manifestation of the agent self. 

6. For Froebel, the will is free. For Herbart, the will is 
determined. But the synthetic hypothesis is tenable, that 
the self is in process of winning its way out of determination 
into freedom. 

7. In his metaphysic, Herbart emphasises the unchange- 
able character of reality. On the other hand, the philosophy 
of Froebel assumes the reality of change. But for an ontology 



Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 115 

of evolutionary idealism, reality involves change in the perma- 
nent, and permanence in change. 

8. For Froebel as well as Herbart, character is the end 
of education. But Froebel aims at character in progress 
and Herbart at character in equilibrium. The true aim in 
education, from the standpoint of the individual, is a char- 
acter of moving equilibrium or equilibrated progress. 

9. The ideal of Herbart is a static perfection. That of 
Froebel is a progressive betterment. But while, from the 
standpoint of humanity, ideals are dynamic, yet viewed 
sub specie aeternitatis they may be perfect and complete. 

10. Both Froebel and Herbart find that there is nothing 
good but the good will. But in the development of the 
good will, Herbart emphasises the intellect, and Froebel the 
emotions. The will, however, is the concrete mind, viewed 
as dynamic, of which feeling and intellect are the sectional 
phases. Emotion may be regarded as the periphery of 
thought, and thought as the focus of emotion. 

11. For Herbart, ideas make the character. For Froebel, 
the development of potentialities makes the character. But 
character is less a product than a process; and potentialities 
and ideas are functional aspects of that process. 

12. Herbart emphasises culture; Froebel, to a degree, 
nature. But nature, teleologically interpreted, is cultural. 
Nature, as origin, is not opposed to culture, as value; but 
these are terminal aspects of the education of man. 

13. To a certain extent, Herbart emphasises curriculum 
the more; and Froebel method. But method is the curri- 
culum as dynamic. 

14. Herbart to a degree emphasises the technique, and 
Froebel the spirit of instruction. Technique should be in- 
formed with an aspect of subjectivism, or made one's own, 

15. Herbart would educate by instruction, Froebel by 
development. But development and instruction are simply 
the subjective and objective aspects of the educative process. 

16. Herbart does not educate for vocation; Froebel edu- 
cates for " spiritual " vocation. Perhaps vocational training 
may be made both cultural and spiritual. 



Ii6 Herbart and Froebel. 

17. Herbart educates for individual perfection; Froebel for 
religious and institutional life. But a synthesis is possible, 
for true individuality implies institutionalism. 

18. Froebel emphasises freedom in education; and Her- 
bart, control. But the only trustworthy control, and the 
only effectual freedom, are synthesised in self-control. 

19. For Herbart, education moves towards a socially de- 
termined pattern. For Froebel, it attempts to liberate the 
divine element in the individual. But, pragmatically, social- 
isation and liberation are one and the same. 

20. Herbart aims at many-sided interest as a mental type. 
Froebel is more concerned with best-sided interest. Syn- 
thetically there are reasons for regarding the existence of 
interests as an argument for their development; but not for 
their fortuitous or even equal development. 



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